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ANDEESONYILLE: 



A STORY OF 



REBEL MILITARY PRISOiNb, 



FIFTEEN MONTHS A GUEST OF THE SO-CALLED 
SOUTHEPvN CONFEDERACY. 



A PRIVATE SOLDIER'S EXPERIENCE 



RICHMOND, ANDERSON VILLE, SAVANNAH, MILLEN, 
BLACKSHEAR AND FLORENCE. 



By JOHN Mcelroy, 

Late of Co. L, IGin. III. Cav. 



\ 



TOLEDO: 

PUBLISHED BY D. R. LOCKE. 

1S79. 



COPYEIGIIT. 

1879. 

By JOHN Mcelroy. 



ALL RIGHTS EESERVED, 






Blade Printing and Taper Co. 
Elfftrotypers^ Printers and Binders, 



TOLEDO, O. 



TO THE HONORABLE 

NOAH H. SWAYNE, 

JUSTICE OF THE SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES, 

A JURIST OF DISTINGUISHED TALENTS AND EXALTED CHARACTER; 

ONE OF THE LAST OF THAT 

ADMIRABLE ARRAY OP PURE PATIilOTS AND SAGACIOUS COUNSELORS, 

WHO, IN 

THE YEARS OF THE NATION'S TRIAL, 

FAITHFULLY' SURROUNDED THE GREAT PRESIDENT, 

AND, WITH ni:a, bore the burden 

OF 

THOSE M03XENT0US DAYS ; 

AND WHOSE WISDOJI AND FAIRNESS HAVE DONT: SO MUCH SINCE 

TO 

CONSERVE WHAT WAS THEN WON, 

THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED AVITH RESPECT AND APPRECIATION, 

BY THE AUTHOR. 



i 



i 



INTRODUCTION. 



The fifth part of a century almost has sped with the flight 

c1 time since the outbreak of the Slaveholder's Rebellion against 

the United States. The young men of to-day were then babes 

in their cradles, or, if more than that, too young to be ay)palled 

by the terror of the times. Those now graduating from our 

schools of learning to be teachers of youth and leaders of 

public thought, if they are ever prepared to teach the history 

of the war for the Union so as to render adequate honor to 

its 4rtyrs and heroes, and at the same time impress the obvious 

",c<;al to be drawn from it, must derive their knowledge from 

-Vrs who can each one say of the thrilling story he is 

.red to tell: "All of which I saw, and part of which I was." 

The Vriter is honored with the privilege of introducing to 

.le "^acer a volume written by an author who was an actor 

a sufferer in the scenes he has so vividly and faithfully 

jed, and sent forth to the public by a publisher whose 

•y contributions in support of the loyal cause entitle him 

. hig lest, appreciation. Both author and publisher have 

■jQiiorable and efficient part in the great struggle, and 

Ire worthy to hand down to the future a record of 

encountered and the sufferings endured by patriotic 

iQ the prisons of the enemy. The publisher, at the 

;.Jng of the war, entered, with zeal and ardor upon the 

J of raising a company of men, intending to lead them to 

*iield. Prevented from carrying out this design, his energies 

«:e directed to a more effective service. His famous " Nasby 

-Ctters " exposed the absurd and sophistical argumentations of 



vm. INTRODUCTION. 

rebels and their sympathisers, in such broad, attractive and 
admirable burlesque, as to direct against them the " loud, long 
laughter of a world!" The unique and telling satire of these 
papers became a power and inspiration to our armies in the 
field and to their anxious friends at home, more than equal 
to the might of whole battalions poured in upon the enemy. 
An athlete in logic may lay an error writhing at his feet, and 
'i^fter all it may recover to do great mischief. But the sharp 
wit of the humorist drives it before the world's derision into 
shame and everlasting contempt. These letters were read and 
shouted over gleefully at every camp-fire in the Union Army, 
and eagerly devoured by crowds of listeners when mails were 
opened at country post-offices. Other humorists were content 
when they simply amused the reader, but " Nasby's " jests were 
arguments — they had a meaning — they were suggested by the 
necessities and emergencies of the Nation's peril, and written 
to support, with all earnestness, a most sacred cause. 

The author, when very young, engaged in journalistic work, 
until the drum of the recruiting officer called him to join the 
ranks of his country's defenders. As the reader is told, he 
was made a prisoner. He took with him into the terrible 
prison enclosure not only a brave, vigorous, youthful spirit, 
but invaluable habits of mind and thought for storing up the 
incidents and experiences of his prison life. As a journalist 
he had acquired the habit of noticing and memorizing every 
striking or thrilling incident, and the experiences of his prison 
life were adapted to enstamp themselves indelibly on both 
feeling and memory. He speaks from personal experieLV*^ and 
from the stand-point of tender and complete sympaiVly with 
those of his comrades who suffered more than he did himself. 
Of his qualifications, the writer of these introductory words 
need not speak. The sketches themselves testify to his ability 
with such force that no commendation is required. 

This work is needed. A generation is arising who do not 
know what the preservation of our free government cost in blood 



INTRODUCJ iON. IX. 

and Suffering. Even jthe men of the passing generation begin 
to be forgetful, if we may judge from the recklessness or 
carelessness of their political action. The soldier is not always 
remembered nor honored as he should be. But, what to the 
future of the great Republic is more important, there is great 
danger of our people under-estimating the bitter animus and 
terrible malignity to the Union and its defenders cherished by 
those who made war upon it. This is a point we can not 
afford to be mistaken about. And yet, right at this point this 
volume will meet its severest criticism, and at this point its 
testimony is most vital and necessary. 

Many will be slow to believe all that is here told most 
truthfully of the tyranny and cruelty of the captors of our brave 
boys in blue. There are no parallels to the cruelties and 
malignities here described in Northern society. The system of 
slavery, maintained for over two hundred years at the South, 
had performed a most perverting, morally desolating, and we 
might say, demonizing work on the dominant race, which people 
bred under our free civilization can not at once understand, 
nor scarcely believe when it is declared unto them. This 
reluctance to believe unwelcome truths has been the snare of 
our national life. We have not been willing to believe how 
hardened, despotic, and cruel the wielders of irresponsible power 
may become. 

When the anti-slavery reformers of thirty years ago set forth 
the cruelties of the slave system, they were met with a storm 
of indignant denial, villification and rebuke. Whfeir Theodore 
D. Weld issued his " Testimony of a Thousand Wfinesses," to 
the cruelty of slavery, he introduced it with a few words, 
pregnant with sound philosophy, which can be applied to the 
work now introduced, and may help the reader better to 
accept and appreciate its statements. Mr. Weld said : — 

"Suppose I should seize you, rob you of your liberty, drive 
you into the field, and make you work without pay as long as 
you lived. Would that be justice? Would it be kindness? 



INTKODUCTIOM. 

Or would it be monstrous injustice and cruelty? Now, is the 
man who robs you every day too tender hearted ever to cuff 
or kick you? He can empty your pockets without remorse, 
hut if your stomach is empty, it cuts him to the quick. He 
can make you work a life-time without pay, but loves you 
too well to let you go hungry. He fleeces you of your rights 
with a relish, but is shocked if you work bare-headed in 
summer, or without warm stockings in winter. He can make 
you go without your liberty, but never without a shirt. He can 
crush in you all hope of bettering your condition by vowing 
that you shall die his slave, but though he can thus cruelly 
torture your feelings, he will never lacerate your back — he can 
break your heart, but is very tender of your skin. He can strip 
you of all protection of law, and all comfort in religion, and 
thus expose you to all outrages, but if you are exposed to the 
weather, half-clad and half-sheltered, how yearn his tender 
bowels ! What ! talk of a man treating you well while robbing 
you of all you get, and as fast as you get it ? And robbing 
you of yourself, too, your hands and feet, your muscles, limbs 
and senses, your body and mind, your liberty and earnings, 
your free speech and rights of conscience, your right to acquire 
knowledge, property and reputation, and yet you are content 
to believe without question that men who do all this by their 
slaves have soft hearts oozing out so lovingly toward their 
human chatties that they always keep them well housed and 
well clad, never push them too hard in the field, never make 
their dear backs smart, nor let their dear stomachs get empty!" 
In like manner we may ask, are not the cruelties and 
oppressions described in the following pages what we should 
legitimately expect from men who, all their lives, have used whip 
and thumb-screw, shot-gun and blood-hound, to keep human 
beings subservient to their will ? Are we to expect nothing but 
chivalric tenderness and compassion from men who made war 
on a tolerant government to make more secure their barbaric 
system of oppression? 



INTRODUCTION. XI. 

These things are written because they are true. Duty to the 
brave dead, to the heroic living, who have endured the pangs 
of a hundred deaths for their country's sake ; duty to the 
government which depends on the wisdom and constancy of 
its good citizens for its support and perpetuity, calls for this 
" round, unvarnished tale " of suffering endured for freedom's 
sake. 

The publisher of this work urged his friend and associate in 
journalism to write and send forth these sketches because the 
times demanded just such an expose of the inner hell of the 
Southern prisons. The tender mercies of oppressors are cruel. 
We must accept the truth and act in view of it. Acting wisely 
on the warnings of the past, we shall be able to prevent treason, 
with all its fearful concomitants, from being again the scourge 

and terror of our beloved land. 

ROBERT McCUNE. 






M. 






AUTHOR'S PREFACE. 



Fifteen months ago — and one month before it was begun — I 
had no more idea of writing this book than I have now of tak- 
ing up my residence in China. 

While I have always been deeply impressed with the idea that 
the public should know much more of the history of Anderson- 
ville and other Southern prisons than it does, it had never 
occurred to me that I was in any way charged with the duty of 
increasing that enlightenment. 

No affected deprecation of my own abilities had any part in 
this. I certainly knew enough of the matter, as did every other 
boy who had even a month's experience in those terri])le places, 
but the very magnitude of that knowledge overpowered me, by 
showing me the vast requirements of the subject — requirements 
that seemed to make it presumption for any but the greatest 
pens in our literature to attempt the work. One day at Ander- 
sonville or Florence would be task enough for the genius of 
Carlyle or Hugo. Lesser than they would fail preposterously 
to rise to the level of the theme. No writer ever described such 
a deluge of woes as swept over the unfortunates confined in 
Rebel prisons in the last year-and-a-half of the Confederacy's life. 
No man was ever called upon to describe the spectacle and the pro- 
cess of seventy thousand young, strong, able-bodied men, starv- 
ing And rotting to death. Such a gigantic tragedy as this stuns 
the mind and benumbs the imagination. 

I no more felt myself competent to the task than to accom- 
plish one of Michael Angelo's grand creations in sculpture or 
painting. 



Xiy. AUTHOR S PREFACE. 

Study of the subject since confirms me in this view, and my 
only claim for this book is that it is a contribution — a record of 
individual observation and experience — which will add some- 
thing to the material which the historian of the future will find 
available for his work. 

The work was begun at the suggestion of Mr. D. R. Locke, 
(Petroleum V. Nasby), the eminent political satirist. At first it 
was only intended to write a few short serial sketches of prison 
life for the columns of the Toledo Blade. The exceeding 
favor with which the first of the series was received induced 
a great widening of their scope, until finally they took the range 
they now have; 

I know that what is contained herein will be bitterly denied. 
I am prepared for this. In my boyhood I witnessed the savagery 
of the Slavery agitation — in my youth I felt the fierceness of 
the hatred directed against all those who stood by the Nation. 
I know that hell hath no fury like the vindictiveness of those 
who are hurt by the truth being told of them. I apprehend 
being assailed by a sirocco of contradiction and calumny. But 
I solemnly affirm in advance the entire and absolute truth of 
every material fact, statement and description. I assert that, so 
far from there being any exaggeration in any particular, that in 
no instance has the half of the- truth been told, nor could it be, 
save by an inspired pen, I am ready to demonstrate this by any 
test that the deniers of this may require, and I am fortified in 
my position by unsolicited letters from over 3,000 surviving 
prisoners, warmly indorsing the account as thoroughly accurate 
in every respect. 

It has been charged that hatred of the South is the animus of 
this work. Nothing can be farther from the truth. No one has 
a deeper love for every part of our common country than I, and 
no one to-day will make more efforts and, sacrifices to bring the 
South to the same plane of social and material development with 
the rest of the Nation than I will. If I could see that the suf- 
ferings at Andersonville and elsewhere contributed in any con« 



AUTHOR S PREFACE. XV. 

siderable degree to that end, and I should not regret that they had 
been. Blood and tears mark, every step in the progress of the 
race, and human misery seems unavoidable in securing human 
advancement. But I am naturally embittered by the fruitless- 
ness, as well as the uselessness of the misery of Andersonville. 
There was never the least military or other reason for inflicting 
all that wretchedness upon men, and, as far as mortal eye can 
discern, no earthly good resulted from the martyrdom of those 
tens of thousands. I wish I could see some hope that their 
wantonly shed blood has sown seeds that will one day blossom, 
and bear a rich fruitage of benefit to mankind, but it saddens 
me beyond expression that I can not. 

The years 1864-5 were a season of desperate battles, but in 
that time many more Union soldiers were slain behind the 
Rebel armies, by starvation and exposure, than were killed in 
front of them by cannon and rifle. The country has heard 
much of the heroism and sacrifices of those loyal youths who 
fell on the field of battle ; but it has heard little of the still 
greater number who died in prison pen. It knows full well 
how grandly her sons rnet death in front of the serried ranks 
of treason, and but little of the sublime firmness with which 
they endured unto the death, all that the ingenious cruelty of 
their foes could inflict upon them while in captivity. 

It is to help supply this deficiency that this book is written. 
It is a mite contributed to the better remembrance by their 
countrymen of those who in this way endured and died that 
the Nation might live. It is an offering of testimony to future 
generations of the measureless cost of the expiation of a national 
sin, and of the preservation of our national unity. 

This is all. I know I speak for all those still living com- 
rades who went with me through the scenes that I have 
attempted to describe, when I say that we have no revenges 
to satisfy, no hatreds to appease. We do not ask that anyone 
shall be punished. We only desire that the Nation shall 
recognize and remember the grand fidelity of our dead com» 



XVI. AUTHOR S PREFACE. 

rades, and take abundant care that they shall not have died 
in vain. 

For the great mass of Southern people we have only the 
kindliest feeling. We but hate a vicious social system, the 
lingering shadow of a darker age, to which they yield, and which, 
by elevating bad men to power, has proved their own and 
thei^" country's bane. 

The following story does not claim to be in any sense a 
history of Southern prisons. It is simply a record of the 
experience of one individual — one boy — who staid all the 
time with his comrades inside the prison, and had no better 
opportunities for gaining information than any other of his 
40,000 companions. 

The majority of the illustrations in this work are from the 
skilled pencil of Captain O. J. Hopkins, of Toledo, who served 
through the war in the ranks of the Forty-second Ohio. His army 
experience has been of peculiar value to t!ie work, as it has 
enabled him to furnish a series of illustrations whose life-like 
fidelity of action, pose and detail are admirable. 

Some thirty of the pictures, including the frontispiece, and the 
allegorical ill'jstrations of War and Peace, are from the atelier 
of Mr. O. Reich, Cincinnati, O. 

A word as to the spelling : Having always been an ardent 
believer in the reformation of our present preposterous system — 
or rather, no system — of orthography, I am anxious to do what- 
ever lies in my power to promote it. In the following pages the 
spelling is simplified to the last degree allowed by Webster, I 
hope that the time is near when even that advanced spelling 
reformer will be left far in the rear by the progress of a people 
thoroughly weary of longer slavery to the orthographical absurdi- 
ties handed down to us from a remote and grossly unlearned 
anceslry. JOHN McELROY. 

Toledo, O., Dec. 10, 1879. 



ILLUSTRATIONS. 



PaK* 

Frontispiece. 

"War" 8S 

Cumberland Gap, Looking Eastward .83 

A Cavalry Squad , . 88 

The Rebels Marching Tlirougli Jonesville 40 

'Leren Yards Killing the Rebel 42 

A Scared Mule Driver . . .46 

Bugler Sounding " Taps " 50 

Company L Gathering to Meet the Rebel Attack . . . .54 

Tlie Major Refuses to Surrender 59 

N'id Johnson Trying to Kill the Rebel Colonel 63 

Girls Astonished at the Jacket Tabs 67 

Good-bj'e to " Iliatoga " 70 

An E ist Tennesseean 75 

A Ri'bel Dandy 77 

The Rebel Flag 77 

Turner in Quest of British Gold 80 

Barnacle-backs Discouraging a Visit from a Soldier . , , .84 

Ross Calling the Roll 86 

An Evening's Amusement with the Guards 91 

Prisoners' Culinary Outfit 102 

Skimming the Bugs From My Soup 103 

"Spooning" 104 

A Richmond News Bo}' , 1U5 

" Say, Guard ; Do You Want to Buy Some Greenbacks? " , . 106 

A " N'Yaarlier " Ill 

Decoying Boisseux's Dog to Its Death 115 

The Dead Scotchman 117 

Map of Georgia, Suulh Carolina and part of North Carolina . . Vi'i 

Cooking Rations I;j0 

General John W. Winder ly^ 

A Field Hand 1^5 

Scaling the Stockade I39 

Captain Henri Wirz I43 

The Prize-fight for the Skillet 147 

Killing Lice by Singeing 165 

2 



ILLUSTRATIONS, 



87. Stripping the Dead for Clothes .... 

88. A Plymouth Pilgrim 

89. The Grazy Pennsylvanian 

40. Midnight Attack of the Raiders 

41. Ignominious End of a Tunnel Enterprize 

42. Tunneling 

43. Tattooing tlie Tunnel Traitor 

44. Overpowering a Guard 

45. A ]\Iaster of the Hounds 

46. Hounds Tearing a Prisoner 

47. Shot at the Creek by the Guard .... 

48. Cooking Mush ....... 

49. Seitz on Horseback ...;... 

50. Finding Seitz Dead ...... 

51. A Case of Scurvy ....... 

52. Confiscating Soft Soap . . . . . 

53. Religious Services 

54. The Priust Anointing the Dying .... 

55. Raider Fight with one of Ellett's Marine Brigade . 

56. Ke3^ BlufBng His Would-be Assassins 

57. Rebel Artillerists Training the Cannon on the Prison 

58. Overthrow of the Raiders 

59. Arrest of Pete Donnelly » 

60. Death of the Sailor 

61. Execution of the Raiders 

62. Sergeant A. R. Hill, 100th O. V. I . 

63. " Spanking " a Thief 

64. The Wounded Illinois Sergeant .... 

65. The Idiotic Flute-Player 

66. One of Sherman's " Veterans " .... 

67. "You Hoar Me" 

68. Logan Taking Command of the Army of the Tennessee 

69. Death of M'Pherson . 

70. The Work of a Shell , 

71. The Fight for the Flag 

73. In the Rilie-pit After the Battle .... 

73. Taken In 

74. The Author's Appearance on Entering Prison 

75. His Appearance in July, 18G4 

76. Little Red Cap 

77. "Fresh Fish" 

78. Interior of the Stockade, Viewed from the Southwest 

79. Burying the Dead 

80. The Graveyard at Andersonville, as the Rebels Left It 

81. Denouncing the Southern Confederacy 

82. The Charge 

83. "Flagstaff" 

84. Nursing a Sick Comrade 

65, A Dream 



ILLUSTRATIONS. XIX. 

86. The English Bugler 346 

87. The Break in the Stockade 351 

88. At the Spring 363 

89. Morning Assemblage of Sick at the South Gate .... 350 

90. Cancer in the Mouth 3G0 

91. Old Sailor and Chicken 30 1 

92. Deatli of Watts 3G3 

98. Planning Escape 305 

94. Our Progress was Terribly Slow — Every Step Hurt Fearfully 370 

95. " Come Ashore, There, Quick " ..373 

96. fie Shrieked Imprecations and Curses 375 

97. The Chain Gang 370 

98. interior of the Stockade— The Creek at the East Side ... 386 

99. A Section from the East Side of the Prison Showing the Dead Line 389 

100. " Half-past Eight O'clock, and Atlanta's Gone to U— 1 1 " . . 395 

101. Off for " God's Country " 397 

102. Geoigian Development of the "Proud Caucasian" . . . 399 

103. It was Very Unpleasant When a Storm Came Up . . . 405 

104. When We Matched Our Intellects Against a Rebel's . . .406 

105. There was a Post and a Fire 408 

100. Carrying Away the Dirt ". . 40'J 

107. His New Idea was to have a Heavily Laden Cart Driven Around 

Inside the Dead Line 410 

They Stood Around the Gate and Yelled Derisively . . , 411 

Sergeant Frank Beverstock 413 

"Seelleah; You Must Stand Back I" 413 

He Bade Them Good- bye 415 

"Whaah-ye!" 423 

A JIad Sergeant 438 

One of Ferguson's Cavalry 445 

Then the Clear Blue Eyes and Well-remembered Smile . . 448 

He Propped This Up Before the Fire 453 

Millen 454 

A House Build ed With Our Own Hands 457 

Our First Meat 459 

A Lucky Find 463 

Sergeant L. L. Key 473 

We Find Ourselves in the Densest Pine Forest I l^ver Saw . . 473 

The Dogs Came Within Not Less Three Hundred Yards of Us . 475 

" Where Are You Going, You D—d Yank ? " 483 

They Threw Their Blankets, Etc., to Those laside ... 501 

He Crushed It Out of All Shape 503 

" Who Mout These Be ? " 506 

A Roadside View 509 

The Charleston & Savannah Railroad 510 

A Rice Plantation Negro 511 

A Rice Field Gul 514 

A Rice Swamp 515 

A Scene in the '' Burnt District " 618 



XX, ILLUSTRATIONS. 

134. The Part Where We Lay Waa a Mass of Ruins . . , .519 

135. Ruins of St. Finbar Cathedral ,521 

136. The Unlucky Negro Fell, Pierced by a Score of Bullets . . 523 

137. Recapture of the Runaways 530 

138. Corporal J. H. INIatthews 533 

139. " Take These Sliears and Cut My Toes Olf " .... 536 

140. Corporal John W. January 545 

141. Corporal Calviu Bates 548 

142. Andrews Managed to Fish Out the Bag and Pass to Me Three 

Roasted Chickens 594 

143. In God's Country at Last 600 

144. Map of Wilmington and Neighborhood 603 

145. The Mock Monitor 612 

146. Fort Fisher and Connected Works 614 

147. The One Hundred and Fifty Pound Armstrong .... 615 

148. The Infantry Assault on Fort Fisher 617 

149. They Removed Every Trace of Prison Grime .... 624 

150. Boston Corbett 628 

151. The Cemetary at Anderson ville, as Placed in Order by the Party 

Tinder Charge of Miss Clara Barton 638 

163. Trial of Captain Wirz 642 

153. Execution of Captain Wira 643 

154. "Peace" 655 



CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER I. 

Page 
A Strange Land — The TTeart of the Appalachians — The Gateway of an 

Empire — A Sequestered Vale, atid a Primitive, Arcadian, Non-pro- 
gressive People ... . . - 83 

CHAPTER II. 

Scarcity of Food for the Army — Raid for Forage — Encounter with the 
Rebels — Sharp Cavalry Fight — Defeat of the "Johnnies " — Powell's 
Valley Opened Up . . 37 

CHAPTER III. 

Living Off the Enemy — "Reveling in the Fatness of the Country — Soldierly 
Purveying and Camp Cookery — Susceptible Teamsters and Their 
Tendency to Flightiness — Making a Soldier's Bed .... 45 

CHAPTER IV. 

A Bitter Cold Morning and a Warm Awakening — Trouble All Along the 
Line — Fierce Conflicts, Assaults and Defense — Prolonged and Des- 
perate Struggle, Ending with a Surrender 52 

CHAPTER V. 

The Reaction — Depression — Biting Cold — Sharp Hunger and Sad Re- 
flection . . 61 

CHAPTER VL 

" On to Richmond!" — IMarching on Foot Over the Mountains — My Horse 
has a New Rider — Unsophisticated Mountain Girls — DiscuHsing the 
Issues of the War — Parting with " Iliatoga" ... 65 

CHAPTER VH. 

Entering Richmond — Disappoiatment at its Appearance — Everybody in 
Uniform — Curled Darlings of the Capital — The Rebel Flag — Libby 
Prison — Dick Turner — Searching the New Comers ... 74 



XXU. CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER VIII. 

Introduction to Prison Life — The Pembeiton Building and its Occupants 
— Neat Sailors — Roll Call — Rations aud Clothing — Chi valric "Con- 
fiscation " 83 

CHAPTER IX. 

Beans or Peas — InsufQciency of Darky Testimony — A Guard Kills a 
Prisoner — Prisoners Tease the Guards — Desperate Outbreak . 89 

CHAPTER X. 

The Exchange and the Cause of its Interruption — Brief Resume of the 
Different Cartels, and the Difficulties that Led to Their Suspension 95 

CHAPTER XI. 

Putting in the Time — Rations — Cooking Utensils — "Fiat" Soup — 
"Spooning" — African Newspaper Venders — Trading Greenbacks 
for Confederate Money — Visit from John Morgan . . . 101 

CHAPTER XII. 

Remarks as to Nomenclature —Vaccinal ion and Its Effects—" N' Yaarker's," 
Their Characteristics, and their Methods of Operating . . 109 

CHAPTER XIII. 

Belle Isle — Terrible Suffering from Cold and Hunger — Fate of Lieuten- 
ant Boisseux's Dog — Our Company Mj^stery — Termination of All 
Hopes of Its Solution 114 

(CHAPTER XIV. 

Hoping for Exchange — An Exposition of the Doctrine of Chances — Off 
for Andersonville — Uncertainty as to Our Destination — Arrival at 
Andersonville 118 

CHAPTER XV. 

Georgia — A Lean and Hungry Land — Difference between Upper and 
Lower Georgia — The Village of Andersonville .... 122 

CHAPTER XVI. 

Waking Up in Andersonville — Some Description of the Place — Our 
First Mail — Building SLt-lter — Gen. Winder — Himself and Lineage 128 

CHAPTER XVIL 

The Plantation Negros — Not Too Stupid to be Loyal — Their Dithyrambic 
Music — Copperhead Opinion of Longfellow .... 134 

CHAPTER XVIIL 

Schemes and Plans to Escape — Scaling the Stockade — Establishing the 
DeadLine — The First Man Killed ...... 138 



CONTENTS. XXUl. 



CHAPTER XIX. 



CJapt. Henri Wirz — Some Description of a Small-minded Personage, who 
Gained Great Notoriety — First Experience with His Disciplinary 
Method 143 

CHAPTER XX. 

Prize-fight Among the N'Yaarkers — A Great Many Formalities, and Little 
Blood Spilt — A Futile Attempt to Recover a Watch — Defeat of the 
Law and Order Party 146 

CHAPTER XXL 

Diminishing Rations — A Deadly Cold Raiu — Hovering Over Pitch Pine 

Fires — Increase of ^lurtiility — A Tlieory of Health . . . 151 

CHAPTER XXII. 

Difference Between Alabamians and Georgians — Death of "Poll Parrott" 
— A Good Joke Upon the Guard — A Brutal Rascal . . . 150 

CHAPTER XXIII. 

A New Lot of Prisoners — The Battle of Oolustee — Men Sacrificed to a 
General's Incompetency — A Hoodlum Reinforcement — A Queer 
Crowd — Mistreatment of an Officer of a Colored Regiment — Killing 
the Sergeant of a Negro Squad . ..'.... 160 

CHAPTER XXIV. 

April — Longing to Get Out — The Death Rate — The Plague of Lice — 
The So called Hospital 164 

CHAPTER XXV. 

The "Plymouth Pilgrims "— Sad Transition from Comfortable Barracks 
to Andersonville — A Crazed Pennsylvanian — Development of the 
Sutler Business 168 

CHAPTER XXVL 

Longings for God's Country — Considerations of the Methods of Getting 
There — Exchange and Escape — Digging Tunnels, and the Difficul- 
ties Connected Therewith — Punishment of a Traitor . . , 174 

CHAPTER XXVII. 

The Hounds, and the Difficulties They Pat in the Way of Escape — The 

Whole South Patrolled by Them ... ... 181 

CHAPTER XXVIIL 

May — Influx of New Prisoners — Disparity in Numbers Between the 
Eastern and Y/estern Armies — Terrible Crowding — Slaughter of 
Men at the Creek 186 



XXIV. CONTENTS. 

CHAPTER XXIX. 

Some Dislinctiou Between Soldierly Duty and Murder — A Plot to Escape 
— It Is Revealed and Fru^rated 191 

CIIArTER XXX. 

June — Possibilities of a Murderous Cannonade — "What was Proposed 
to be Done in That Event — A False Alarm — Deterioration of the 
Rations — Fearful Increase of Mortality . . . . . 195 

CHAPTER XXXI. 

Dying by Inches — Scitz, the Slow, and His Death — Stiggall and Emer- 
son — Ravages of the Scurvy 200 

CHAPTER XXXII. 

"Ole Boo," and " Ole Sol, the Haymaker " — A Fetid, Burning Desert — 
Noisome "Water, and the Effects of Drinking It — Stealing S jft Soap 207 

CHAPTER XXXIII. 

" Pour Passer le Temps " — A Set of Chessmen Procured Under Diflicul- 
ties — Religious Services — The Devoted Priest — War Song . 213 

CHAPTER XXXIV. 

Maggots, Lice and Raiders— Practices of The-" Human "Vermin — Plun- 
dering the Sick and Dying; — Night Attacks, and Battles by Day — 
Hard Times for the Small Tradi.'rs .... .220 

CHAPTER XXXV. 

A Community without Government — Formation of the Regulators — 
Raiders Attack Key but are Bluffed Off — Assault of the Keguljitors 
on the Raiders — Desperate Battle — Overthrow of the Raiders . 225 

CHAPTER XXXVI. 

Why the Regulators were not Assisted by the Entire Camp — Peculiari- 
ties of Boys from Different Sections — Hunting the Raiders Down — 
Exploits of Jly Left-handed Lieutenant — Running the Gauntlet . 234 

CHAPTER XXXVII. 

The Execution — Building the Scaffold — Doubts of the Camp — Captain 
"Wirz Thinks It Is Probably a RiTse to Force the Stockade — His 
Prepiirations Against Such an Attempt — Entrance of the Doomed 
Ones — They Realize Their Fate — One Makes a L^esperate Elforl to 
Escape — His Re-capture — Intense Excitement — "Wirz Orders the 
Guns to Open — Fortunately They Do Not — The Six are Hanged — 
One Breaks His Rope — Scene "When the Raiders are Cut Down . 2-11 

CHAPTER XXXVIII. 

A.fter the Execution — Formation of a Police Force — Its First Chief — 
" Spanking " an Offender 253 



CONTEXTS. XXV, 

CHAPTER XXXIX. 

July — The Prison Bocomes More Crowded, the Weather ITotler, Rations 
PuoriT, and ilortality Greater — Some of the Phenomena of SuHer- 
iug and Death . . 258 

CHAPTER XL. 

The Battle of the 32d of July — The Army of the Tennessee Assaulted 
Front and Rear — Death of General McFhersou — Assumption of 
Command by General Lo^an — Result o.f the Battle . . 264 

CHAPTER XLl. 

Cloth i n ij : Its Rapid Deterioration, and Devices to Replenish It — Des- 
perate Efforts 10 Cover Nakedness — "Little Red Cap" and llis 
Letter 288 

CHAPTER XLIL 

Some Features of the ■Jlortality — Percentage of Deaths to Those Living 
— An Averai^e Man Only Stands the Misery Three Mouths — Descrip- 
tion of the Prison and the Condition of the Men Therein, by a Lead- 
ing ScientiOc Man of the South 294 

CHAPTER XLIIL 

Difficulty of Exercising — Embarrassments of a Morning Walk — The 
Rialto of the Prison — Cursing the Southern Confederacy — Tlie Story 
of the Battle of Spoltsylvania Court House . . . , . 823 

CHAPTER XLIV. 

Rebel Music — Singular Lack of the Creative Power Among the South- " 
erners — Contrast with Similar People Elsewhere — Their Favorite 
Music, and where it was Borrowed from — A Fifer with One Tune 330 

CHxVPTER XLV. 

August — Needles Stuck in Pumpkin Seeds — Some Phenomena of 

Starvation — Rioting in Remembered Luxuries . . ,338 

CHAPTER XLVL 

A Surly Briton — The Stolid Courage that makes the English Flag a Ban- 
ner of Triumph — Our Company Bugler, His Characteristics atid 
His Death — Urgent Demand for Mechanics — None "Want to Go — 
Treatment of a Rebel Shoemaker — Enlargement of the Stockade — 
It is Broken by a Storm — The Wonderful Spring . 345 

CHAPTER XLVIL 

"Sick Call," and the Scenes that Accompanied It — Mustering the Lame, 
Halt and Diseased at the South Gate — An Unusually Bad Case — 
Going Out to the Hospital — Accommodation and Treatment of the 
Patients There — The Horrible Suffering in the Gangrene Ward — 
Bungling Amputations by Blundering Practitioners — Affection Be- 
tween a Sailor and His Ward — Death of My Comrade . . 868 



XXVI. CONTENTS. 

CHAPTER XLVIII. 

Determination to Escape — Different Plans and their Merits — I Prefer 
the Appalachicoh\ Route — Preparations for Departure — A Hot Day 
— The Fence Passed Successfully — Pursued by the Hounds — 
Caught — Returned to the Stockade 364 

CHAPTER XLIX. 

August — Good Luck in not Meeting Captain Wirz — That "Worthy's 
Treatment of Recaptured Prisoners — Secret Societies in Prison — 
Singular Meeting and its Result — Discovery and Removal of the 
Officers Among the Enlisted Men 374 

CHAPTER L. 

Food — Its Meagerness, Inferior Quality, and Terrible Sameness — Rebel 

Testimony on the Subject — Futility of Successful Explanation , 380 

CHAPTER LI. 

Solicitude as to the Fate of Atlanta and Sherman's Army — Paucity of 
News — How "We Heard that Atlauta Ilad Fallen — Announcement 
of a General Exchange — "We Leave Andersonville . . . 394 

CHAPTER LII. 

Savannah — Devices to Obtain Materials for a Tent — Their Ultimate 
Success — Resumption of Tunneling — Escaping by "Wholesale and 
Being Re-captured en masse — The Obstacles that Lay Between Us and 
Our Lines . i- . . . 404 

CHAPTER LIII. 

Frank Beverstock's Attempt at Escape — Passing Off as a Rebel Boy He 
Reaches Griswoldville by Rail, and then Strikes Across the Country 
for Sherman, but is Caught within Twenty Miles of Our Lines . 413 

CHAPTER LIV. 

Savannah Proves to be a Change for the Better — Escape from the Brats 
of Guards — Comparison Between Wirz and Davis — A Brief Inter- 
val @f Good Rations — Winder, the Man with the Evil Eye — The 
Disloyal Work of a Shyster 420 

CHAPTER LV. 

"Why We Vi'ere Hurried Out of Andersonville — The Effect of the Fall of 
Atlanta — Our Longing to Hear the News — Arrival of Some Fresh 
Kish — How We Knew They "Were "Western Boys — Difference in 
the Appearance of the Soldiers of the Two Armies . . . 431 

CHAPTER LVI. 

What Caused the Fall of Atlanta — A Dissertation Upon an Important 
Psychological Problem — The Battle of Jonesboro — "Why It "Was 



CONTENTS. XXVn. 

Fought — How Sherman Deceived Hood — A Desperate Bayonet 
Charge, and the Only Successful One in the Atlanta Campaign — A 
Gallant Colonel and How He Died — The Heroism of Some Enlisted 
Men — Going Calmly Certain Death 488 

CHAPTEK LVII. 

A Fair Sacrifice — The Story of One Boy Who Willingly Gave His Young 
Life for His Country . . 448 

CHAPTER LVKI. 

We Leave Savannah — More Hopes of Exchange — Scenes at Departure 
—"Flankers"— On the Back Track Toward Andersonville — Alarm 
Thereat — At the Parting of Two Ways — We Finally Bring Up at 
Camp Lawton 450 

CHAPTER LIX. 

Our New Quarters at Camp Lawton — Building a Hut — An Exceptional 
Commandant — He is a Good Man, but will Take Bribes — Rations 465 

CHAPTER LX. 

The Raiders Re-appear on the Scene — The Attempt to Assassinate Those 
Who were Concerned in the Execution — A Couple of Lively Fights, 
in Which the Raiders are Defeated — Holding an Election . . 460 

CHAPTER LXI. 

The Rebels Formally Propose to Us to Desert to Them — Contumelious 
Treatment of the Proposition — Their Rage — An Exciting Time — 
An Outbreak Threatened — Difficulties Attending Desertion to the 
Rebels 466 

CHAPTER LXn. 

Sergeant Leroy L. Key — His Adventures Subsequent to the Execution — 
He Goes Outside at Andersonville on Parole — Labors in the Cook- 
house — Attempts to Escape — Is Re-captured and Taken to Macon 
— Escapes from There, but is Compelled to Return — Is Finally Ex- 
changed at Savannah 471 

CHAPTER LXIIL 

Dreary Weather — The Cold Rains Distress All and Kill Hundreds — 
Exchange of Ten Thousand Sick — Captain Bowes Turns a Pretty, 
but Not Very Honest, Penny 486 

CHAPTER LXIV. 

Another Removal — Sherman's Advance Scares thd Rebels Into Running 
Us Away From Millen — We are Taken to Savannah, and Thence 
Down the Atlantic & Gulf Road to Blackshear .... 490 



XXVm. CONTENTS. 

CHAPTER LXV. 

Blackshear and Pierce County — We Take Up New Quarters, but are Callcu 
Out for Exchange — Excitement Over Signing the Parole — A Happy 
Journey to Savannah — Grievous Disappointment . . . 49d 

CHAPTER LXVI. 

A Specimen Conversation with an Average Native Georgian — We 
Learn that Sherman is Heading for Savannah — The Reserves Get a 
Little Setting Down 505 

CHAPTER XLVH. 

Off to Charleston — Passing Through the Rice Swamps — Two Extremes ■ 
of Society — Entry into Charleston — Leisurely Warfare — Shelling 
the City at Regular Intervals — We Camp in a Mass of Ruins — De- 
parture for Florence 518 

CHAPTER LXVni 

First Days at Florence — Introduction to Lieutenant Barrett, the Red- 
headed Keeper — A Brief Description of Our New Quarters — Win- 
der's Malign InHucuce Manifest . . ... 524 

CHAPTER XLIX. 

Barrett's Insane Cruelty — How He Punished Those Alleged to be En- 
gaged in Tunneling — The Misery in the Stockade — Men's Limbs 
Rotting Off with Dry Gangrene 533 

CHAPTER LXX. 

House and Clothes — EffQVts to Erect a Suitable Residence — Difficulties 
Attending This — Varieties of Florentine Architecture — Waiting for 
Dead Men's Clothes — Craving for Tobacco 538 

CHAPTER LXXL 

December — Rations of Wood and Food Grow Less Daily — Uncertainty 
as to the Mortality at Florence — Even the Government's Statistics 
are Very Deficient — Care for the Sick . . . 5-12 

CUxU^TER LXXIL 

Dull Winter Days — Too Weak and Too Stupid to Amuse Ourselves — 
Attempts of the Rebels to Recruii Us Into Their Army — The Class 
of Men They Obtained — Vengeance on " the Galvanized " — A Sin- 
gular Experience — Rare Glimpses of Fun — Inability of the Rebels 
to Count 550 

CHAPTEli LXXIIL 

Christmas, and the Way It Was Passed — The Daily Routine of Ration 
Drawing — Some Peculiarities of Living and Dying . . . 557 



CONTENTS. XXIX. 

CHAPTER LXXIV. 

New Year's Day — Death of John II. Winder — He Dies on His "Way to 
a Dinner — Something as to Ciiaracter and Career — One of the 
Worst Men That Ever Lived 6fl] 

CHAPTER LXXV. 

One Instance of a Successful Escape —The Adventures of Sergeant Walter 
Hartsough, of Company K, Sixteenth Illinois Cavalry — He Gets 
Away from the Rebels at Thomasvillc, and after a Toilsome and Dan- 
gerous Journey of Several Hundred JMiles, Reaches Our Lines in 
Florida 687 

CHAPTER LXXVL 

The Peculiar Type of Insanity Prevalent at Florence — Barrett's Wanton- 
ness of Cruelty — We Learn of Sherman's Advance Into South Car- 
olina — The Rebels Begin Moving the Prisoners Away — Andrews 
and I Change Our Tactics, and Stay Behind — Arri'^al of Five 
Prisoners from Sherman's Command — Their Unbounded Confidence 
in She; man's Success, and Its Beneficial Eilcct Upon Us . . 576 

CHAPTER LXXVII. 

Fruitless Waiting for Sherman — "We Leave Florence — Intelligence of the 
Fall of Wilmington Communicated to Us by a Slave — The Turpen- 
tine Region of North Carolina — We Come Upon a Rebel Line of 
Battle — Yankees at Both Ends of the Road 586 

CHAPTER LXXVIIL 

Return to Florence and a Short Sojourn There — Off Toward Wilming- 
ton Again — Cribbing a Rebel Officer's Lunch — Signs of Approach- 
ing Our Lines — Terror of Our Rascally Guards — Entrance Into 
God's Country at Last . , 593 

CHAPTER LXXIX. 

Getting Used to Freedom — Delights of a Land Where There Is Enough 
ot Everything — First Glimpse of the Old Flag — Wilmington and its 
History — Lieutenant Gushing — First Acquaintance with the Colored 
Troops — Leaving for Home — Destruction of the " Thorn" by a Tor- 
pedo — The Mock Moniior's Achievement 599 

CHAPTER LXXX. 

Visit to Fort Fisher, and Inspection of that Stronghold — The Way It 
Was Captured — Out on the Ocean Sailing — Terribly Sea Sick — 
Rapid Recovery — Arrival at Annapolis — Washed, Clothed and Fed 
— Unbounded Luxury, and Days of Unadulterated Happiness , 614 



XXX. CONTENTS. 

CHAPTER LXXXI. 

Religious Life and Work in Anclersonville — How Captured — Impressions 
on Reaching the Prison — How Treated — Looking for Religious 
Companions — Notes from Day to Day — Coadjutors in Organizing 
Prayer Meetings — Brutal Treatment of the Sick by Rebels — Meager 
Rations, Etc 628 

CHAPTER LXXXIL 

Captain Wirz, the Only One of the Prison-keepers Punished — His Arrest, 

Trial and Execution 63& 

CHAPTER LXXXIII. 

The Responsibility — Who Was to Blame for All the Misery — An Ex- 
amination of the Flimsy Excuses Made for the Rebels — One Docu- 
ment That Con7)<*«a them — What Is Desired . . . . 645 







We wait beneath the furnace blast 

The pangs of transformalion ; 
Not painlessly doth God recast 
And mold anew the nation. 
Hot burns the fire 
Where wrongs expire ; 
Nor spares the hand 
That from the laud 
Uproots the ancient evil. 

The hand-breadth cloud the sages feared 

Its bloody rain is dropping ; 
The poison plant the fathers spared 
All else is overtopping. 
East, West, South, North, 
It curses the eanh ; 
All justice dies. 
And fraud and lies 
Live only in its shadow. 



Then let the selfish lip be dumb, 

And hushed the breath of sighing; 
Before the joy of peace must come 
The pains of purifying. 
God give us grace 
Each in his place 
To bear his lot. 
And, murmuring not, 
Bndore and wait and labor ! 

— Whittikb. 



53 



ANDERSONVILLE: 



A STORY OF REBEL MILITARY PRISONS 



CHAPTER I. 



A. STRANGE LAND THE HEART OF THE APPALACHIANS THE GATE- 
WAT OF AN EMPIRE A SEQUESTERED VALE, AND A PRIMITrVE, 

ARCADIAN, NON-PROGRESSIVE PEOPLE. 




A LOW, square, 
plainly-hewn stone, 
set near the summit 
of the eastern ap- 
proach to the form- 
idable natural fort- 
>^:: ress of Cumberland 
Gap, indicates the 
boundaries of the 
three great States 
of Yirginia, Ken- 
- -c^-.-- tucky and Tennes- 
see. 
It is such a place as, re- 
membering the old Greek 
and Eoman myths and super- 
stitious, one would recognize 
*/ ^ <.- as fitting to mark the con- 

_ - ' fines of the territories of great 

masses of strong, aggn^ssive, 
cuMBERLAiTD SAP, LooKiNQ BASTTTARD. aud frcqucutly confljcting 
peoples. There the god Terminus should have had one of his 
chief temples, where his shrine would be shadowed by barriers 
rising above the clouds, and his sacred sohtude guarded from 




34 /LNDEBSONVTLLH,. 

the mde invasion of armed hosts by rani^^e on range of battle- 
mented rocks, cro^vning almost inaccessible mountains, inter- 
posed across every approach from the usual haunts of men. 

Roundabout the land is full of strangeness and mystery. The 
throes of some great convulsion of Xature are written on the 
face of the four thousand square miles of territory, of which 
Cumberland Gap is the central point. Miles of granite moun- 
tains are thrust up like giiint wails, huncb'eds of feet high, and 
as smooth and regular as the side of a monument. 

Huge, fantastically-shaped rocks abound ever^^ where — some- 
tunes rising into pinnacles on lofty summits — sometimes hang- 
ing over the verge of beetling cliffs, as if placed tiiere in waiting 
for a time when tliey could be hurled do^vn upon the path of 
an advancing army, and sweep it' away. 

Large streams of water burst, out in the most unexpected 
places, frequently far up mountain sides, and fall in silver vaila 
upon stones beaten round by the ceaseless dash for ages. 
Caves, rich in quaintly-formed stalactites and stalagmites, and 
their recesses filled with metallic salts of the most powerful and 
diverse natures, break the mountain sides at frequent intervals. 
Everywhere one is met by surprises and anomalies. Even the 
rank vegetation is eccentric, and as prone to develop into bizarre- 
foiTns as are the rocks and mountains. 

The dreaded panther ranges through tlie primeval, rarely 
trodden forests ; every crevice in the rocks has for tenants rat- 
tlesnakes or stealthy copperheads, while long, Avonderfully 
swift "blue racers" haunt the edges of the woods, and linger 
around the fields to chill his blood who catches a glimpse of 
their upreared heads, with their great, balefully bright eyes,^ 
and "white-collar" encircled throats. 

The human events happening here have been in harmony 
with the natural ones. It has always been a land of conflict. 
In 1540 — 339 years ago — De Soto, in that energetic but fruit- 
less search for gold which occupied his later years, penetrated to 
this region, and found it the fastness of the Xualans, a bold, 
aggressive race, continually warring with its neighbors. When 
next the white man reached the country — a century and a half 
later — he found the Xualans had been swept away by the con- 
queriug Cherokees, and he witnessed there the most sanguinary 



A 8T0BT OF REBEL MILITAJiT PEIB0N8. 85 

contest between Indians of which our annals give any accoimt 
— a pitched battle two days in duration, between the invading 
Shawnees, who lorded it over what is now Kentucky, Ohio and 
Indiana — and the Cherokees, who dominated the country to 
the southeast of the Cumberland range. Again the Cherokees 
were victorious, and the discomfited Shawnees retired north of 
the Gap. 

Then the white man delivered battle for the possession of 
the land, and bought it with the lives of many gallant adven- 
turers, llalf a centmy later Boone and his hardy companions 
followed, and forced their way into Kentucky. 

Another half century saw the Gap the favorite haunt of the 
greatest of American bandits — the noted. John A. Miu-rell — and 
his gang. They infested the country for years, now waylaying 
the trader or drover threading his toilsome way over the loncl}'^ 
mountains, now descending upon some little town, to plunder 
its stores and houses. 

At length Murrell and his band were driven oHit, and sought 
a new field of operations on the Lower ^lississippi. They left 
germs behind them, however, that developed into horse thieves, 
counterfeiters, and later into guerrillas and bushwhackers. 

"When the Kebellion broke out the region at once became the 
theater of military operations. Twice Cumberlimd Gap was 
seized by the Eebels, and twice was it wrested away from 
them. In 1S61 it was the point whence ZollicoiT(?r launched out 
with his legions to "liberate Kentucky," and it was whither 
they fled, beaten and shattered, after the disasters of Wild Cat 
and MiJl Springs. In 1862 Kirby Smith led his army through 
the Gap on his way to overrun Kentucky and invade the North. 
Three months later his beaten forces sought refuge from their 
pursuers behind its impregnable fortifications. Another year 
saw Eurnside burst through the Gap with a conquering force, 
and redeem loyal East Tennessee from its Rebel oppressors. 

Had the South ever been able to separate from the North, 
the boundary would have been established along this line. 
*** ** ***** 

Between the main ridge upon which Cimiberland Gap is sit- 
uated, and the next range on the southeaj,t which runs parallel 
with it, is a narrow, long, very fruitful valley, walled in on 



86 AITOEKSONVILLE. 

either side for a hundred miles by tall mountains as a City street 
is by high buildings. It is called Powell's Yalley. In it dwell a 
simple, primitive people, shut out from the world almost a« 
'much as if they lived in New Zealand, and with the speech, 
manners and ideas that their fathers brought into the Valley 
when they settled it a century ago. There has been but httle 
change since then. The young men ^vho have annuall}'- driven 
cattle to the distant markets in Kentucky, Temiessee and Yir- 
ginia, have brought back occasional stra}^ bits of finery for 
the "women folks," and the latest improved fire-arms for them- 
selves, but this is about all the innovations the progress of the 
world has been allowed to make. Wheeled vehicles are almost 
unknown ; men and women travel on horseback as they did a 
century ago, the clothing is the ])roduct of the fai»m and the 
busy looms of the women, and life is as rural and Arcadian as 
any ever described in a pastoral. The people are rich in cat- 
tle, hogs, horses, sheep and the products of the field. The fat 
soil brings forth the substantials of life in opulent plenty. 
Having this there seems to be little care for more. Ambition 
nor avarice, nor yet craving after luxury, disturb their con- 
tented souls or drag them away from the non-progressive round 
of gdmple life bequeathed them by their fathers. 



CnAPTER IL 

•OAJlOrrT OF FOOD FOE THE AIIMY KALD FOB FORAGTE ENOOUNTEE 

WITH THE EEBEL8 SHAKP CA VALET FIGHT DEFEAT OF THE 

" JOHNNIES " — Powell's valley opened up. 



As the Autumn of 1863 advanced towards Winter the diffi- 
culty of supplying the forces concentrated around Cumberland 
Gap — as well as the rest of Eurnside's army in East Tennessee 

— became greater and greater. The base of supplies was at 
Camp Nelson, near Lexington, Ky., one hundred and eighty 
miles from the Gap, and all that the Army used had to be hauled 
that distance by mule teams over roads that, in their best state, 
were wretched, and which the copious rains and heavy traffic had 
rendered well-nigh impassable. All the country in our possession 
had been drained of its stock of whatever would contribute to the 
support of man or beast. That portion of Powell's Valley ex- 
tending from the Gap into Yirginia was still in the hands of 
the Rebels; its stock of products was as yet almost exempt 
from military contributions. Consequently a raid was project- 
ed to reduce the Yalley to our possession, and secure its much 
needed stores. It was guarded by the Sixty-fourth Yirginia, 
a mounted regiment, made up of the young men of the local- 
ity, who had then been in the service about two years. 

Maj. C. n. Beer's Third Battalion, SLxteenth Illinois Cavalry 

— four companies, each about 75 strong — was sent on the errand 
of driving out the Rebels and opening up the Yalley for our 
foraging teams. The writer was invited to attend the excur- 
sion. As he held the honorable, but not very lucrative position 
of " high private " in Company L, of the Battalion, and the in- 
Titation came from his Captain, he did not feel at liberty to d&- 



88 



AKDEKSONVILLB. 



cline. He Tvent, as private soldiers have been in the habit of 
doing ever since the days of the old Centurion, who said with 
the characteristic boastfulness of one of the lower grades of 
commissioned officers when he happens to be a snob : 

For 1 am also a man set under authority, having under me soldiers, and I eay unto one, Qo; 
and he goeth ; and to another. Come, and he cometh ; and to my eervan.t, Do this, and he 
doeth it. 

Rather " airy " talk that for a man who nowadays would 
ta.ke rank with Captains of infantry. 



m^ .^m ^^M-^^j 




A CAVALKT SQUAD. 

Three hundred of us res}3onded to the signal of " boots and sad- 
dles," buckled on three hundred more or less trusty sabers and 
revolvers, saddled three hundred more or less gallant steeds, came 
into line " as companies " with the automatic hstlessness of the 
old soldiers, ^^ counted q^hy fours ^^ in. that queer gamut-running 
style that makes a company of men " counting off " — each shout- 
ing a number in a different voice from his neighbor — sound like 



I 



A BTOBY OF REBEL MILITAEY PRISONS. 39 

miming the scales on some great organ badly out of tune ; some- 
thing like this : 






-^ 



^ 



J 



s: 



T^ 



2IZZI 



■ih -it -i ^ ^ 

One. Two. Three. Four. One. Two. Three. Four. One. Two. Three. Four. 

Then, as the bugle sounded '^ Jllg/d forward/ fours right/" 
we moved off at a walk through the melancholy mist that 
soaked througli the very fiber of ma)i and horse, and reduced 
the minds of both to a condition of limp indifference as to things 
past, present and future. 

^Vhither we were going we knew not, nor cared. Such mat- 
ters had long since ceased to excite any interest. A cavalrjTuan 
soon recognizes as the least astonisliing thing in his existence 
the signal to "/«/(? in/ " and start somewhere. He feels tliat he 
is the "Poor Joe" of the Army — under perpetual orders to 
" move on." 

Down we wound over the road that zig-zagged through the 
forts, batteries and rifle-pits covering the eastern ascent to the 
Gap — past the wonderful Murrell Spring — so-called because the 
robber chief had killed, as he stooped to drink, of its crystal wa- 
tei-s, a rich drover, whom he was pretending to pilot tlirough 
the mountains — down to where the " Virginia road " turned 
off sharply to tlie left and entered Powell's Valley. The mist 
had become a chill, dreary rain, through which we plodded 
silently, until night closed in around us some ten miles from the 
Gap. As wp. ha 1 fed to g-^ ■-'^ . ■», an indignant Virginian 

rese^^-f'd the nvr-ir- -^ od by firing at one of the 

guf " ;,e guard looked at the fel- 

loe s ll A .; 3 waste powder on a man 

w — ^. ov^iioG than lo sLay out in such a rain, when 

h in-doors, and the bushwhacker escaped, without 

f m shot. 

re budt, coffee made, horses rubbed, and we laid down 

.0 the lire to get what sleep we could. 

morning vre were awakened by the bitter cold. It 

ed off during the night and turned so cold that every- 

as frozen stiff. This was better than the rain, at aJ] 



40 



ANDEKSONVILLE. 



events. A good fire and a hot cup of coffee would make the 
cold quite endurable. 

At daylight the bugle sounded '' Right forward ! fotirs right /" 
again, and the 300 of us resumed our onward plod over the 
rocky, cedar-crowned hills. 








"#=■ 




'M 



' #^^ ^^-- 



THE REBELS MAECHING THEOUGII JOXESVILLE. 

In the meantime, other things were taking place elsewhere. 
Our esteemed friends of the Sixty-fourth Yirginia, who were in 
camp at the little town of Jonesvillc, about 40 miles from the 
Gap, had learned of our stalling up the Valley to drive them 
out, and they shoAved that warm reciprocity characteristic of 
the Southern soldier, by mounting and starting down the Yalley 
to drive us out. Nothing could be more harmonious, it will be 
perceived. Barring the trifling divergence of views as to tv^ho 
was to drive and who be driven, there was perfect accord in our 
ideas. 

Our numbers were about equal. If I were to say that they 
considerably outnumbered us, I would be following the unive?^ 



A 8TOBY OF KEBEL MILnAKY PEIS0N8. 4:1 

sal precedent. Ko soldier — high or low — ever admitted engag- 
ing an ecjual or inferior force of the enemy. 

About 9 o'clock in the morning — Sunday — they rode through 
the streets of Jonesville on their way to give us battle. It was 
here that most of the members of the Eegiment lived. Every 
man, woman and child in the to'UTi was related in some way to 
nearly every one of the soldiers. 

The women turned out to wave their fathers, husbands, 
brothers and lovers on to victory. The old men gathered to 
give parting counsel and encouragement to their sons and kin- 
dred. The Sixty-fourth rpde away to what hope told them 
would be a glorious victory. 

At noon \vq are still straggling along without much attempt 
at soldierly order, over the rough, frozen hill-sides. It is yet 
bitterly cold, and men and horses draw themselves together* as 
if to expose as little surface as possible to the unldnd elements. 
Not a word had been spoken by any one for hours. 

The head of the column has just reached the top of the hiU, 
and the rest of us are strung along for a quarter of a mile or 
so back. 

Suddenly a few shots ring out upon the frosty air from the 
cai'bines of the advance. The general apathy is instantly re- 
placed by keen attention, and the boys instinctively range them- 
selves into fours — the cavalry unit of action. The Major, who 
is riding about the middle of the first Company — I — dashes to 
the front. A glance seems to satisfy him, for he turns in his 
saddle and his voice rings out : 

" Compcmy I! Fouks left ixto line ! — MAKCTI ! I " 

The Company swings around on the hill-top like a great, 
jointed toy snake. As the fours come into Line on a trot, we see 
every man draw his saber and revolver. The Company raises 
a mighty cheer and dashes forward. 

Company K presses forward to the ground Company I has 
just left, the fours sweep around into line, the sabers and 
revolvers come out spontaneously, the men cheer, and the Com- 
pany llings itself forward. 

All this time we of Company L can see nothing except what 
the companies ahead of us are doing. We are wrought up to 
the highest pitch. As Company K clears its ground, we press 



+2 



AUTDEKSONVILLE. 



forward eagerly. Now we go into line just as we raise the hill, 
and as my four comes around, I catch a hurried glimpse through 
a rift in the smoke of a line of butternut and gray clad men a 
hundred yards or so away. Their guns are at their faces, and I 
see the smoke and fire spurt from the muzzles. At the same 
instant our sabers and revolvers are drawn. We shout in a 
frenzy of excitement, and the horses spring forward as if shot 
from a bow. 

I see nothing more until I reach the place where the Rebel 
line stood. Then I find it is gone. Looking beyond toward 
the bottom of the hill, I see the woods filled with Rebels 
flying in disorder, and our men yelling in pursuit. This is the 
portion of the line which Companies I and K struck. Here 
and there are men in butternut clothing, prone on the frozen 
ground, wounded and dying. I have just time to notice closely 
one middle-aged man lying almost under my horse's feet. Ho 
has received a carbine bullet through his head and his blood 
colors a great space around him. 




'lEVEN TAKDS " KILLING THE KEBEL- 



A STOET OF KEBEL MILITARY PRISONS. 48 

One brave man, riding a roan horse, attempts to rally his 
companions. He Ixalts on a little knoll, wheels his horse to 
face us, and "svaves his hat to draw his companions to him. A 
tall, lank fellow in the next four to me — who goes by the nick- 
name of " 'Leven Yards " — aims his carbine at him, and, with* 
out checking his horse's pace, fires. The lieavj^ Siiarpe's bullet 
tears a gaping hole through the Rebel's heart, lie drops from 
his saddle, his life-blood runs down in little rills on either side 
of the knoll, and his riderless horse dashes away in a panic. 

At this instant comes an order for the Company to break up 
into fours and press on througli the forest in pursuit. My four 
trots off to the road at the right. A Rebel bugler, who has 
been cut off, leaps his horse into the road in front of us. "We 
all fire at him on the impulse of the moment. He falls from 
his hoi'se with a bullet throi^gh his back. Company M, which 
has remained in column as a reserve, is now thundering up 
close behind at a gallop. Its seventy-five powerful horses are 
spuming the solid eartli with steel-clad hoofs. The man will 
be ground into a shapeless mass if left where he has fallen. We 
spring from our horses and drag him into a fence corner ; then 
remount and join in the pursuit. 

This happened on the summit of Cliestnut Ridge, fifteen miles 
from Jonesville. 

Late in the afternoon the anxious watchers at Jonesville saw a 
single fugitive urging his well-nigh spent horse down the slope 
of the hill toward town. In an agony of anxiety they hurried 
forward to meet him and learn his news. 

The first messenger who rushed into Job's presence to 
announce the beginning of the series of misfortunes which were 
to afflict the upright man of Uz is a tji^e of all the cowards 
who, before or since then, liave been the first to speed away 
from the field of battle to spread the news of disjister. He said : 

And the Sabeans fell upon them, and took them away ; yea, they have slain the eervanta 
with the edge of the sword ; and / onli/ am escaped atone to t-ell thee. 

So this fleeing Yirginian shouted to his expectant friends : 
" The boys are aU cut to pieces ; I'm the only one that got 

away." 

The teri'ible extent of his words was belied a httle later, by 

the appearance on the distant summit of the hill of a consider' 



^ AJNDEB80NVILLE. 

able mob of fugitives, flying at the utmost speed of their nearly 
exhausted horses. As thej came on down the hill an almost 
equally disorganized crowd of pursuers appeared on the sum- 
mit, yelling in voices hoarse with continued shouting, and pour- 
ing an incessant fire of carbine and revolver bullets upon the 
hapless men of the Sixty-fourth Yirginia. 

The two masses of men swept on through the town. Beyond 
it, the road branched in several directions, the pursued scattered 
on each of these, and the worn-out pursuer's gave up the chase. 

Eeturning to JonesviUe, we took an account of stock, and 
found that wo were "ahead" one hundred and fifteen prisoners, 
nearly that many horses, and a considerable quantity of small 
arms. IIow many of the enemy had been killed and wounded 
could not be told, as they were scattered over the whole fifteen 
miles between where the fight occurred and the pursuit ended. 
Our loss was trifling. 

Comparing notes around the camp-fires in tlie evening, we 
found that our success had been owing to tlie Major's instinct- 
ive grasp of the situation, and the soldierly Avay in which he 
took advantage of it. When he reached the summit of the hill 
he found the Rebel line nearly formed and ready for action. 
A moment's hesitation might have been fatal to us. At his 
command Company I went into line with the thouglit-like celer- 
ity of trained cavalry, and instantly dashed through the right * 
of the Rebel line. Company K followed and plunged thi'ough 
the Rebel center, and when we of Company L arrived on the 
ground, and charged the left, the last vestige of resistance was 
swept away. The whole affair did not probably occupy more 
than fifteen minutes. 

This was the way Powell's Valley was opened to our foragers. 



CHAPTEE TIL 

littng off the fneirt reveling in the fatne88 of the (johntbt 

boldiekly purveying and camp cookery scbgei^lblk 

teamsters and their tendency to fliqhtiness making a 

soldier's bed. 

For weeks we rode up and down — hither and thither — along 
the length of the narrow, granite-walled Yallej" ; between moun- 
tains so lofty that the sun labored slowly over them in the 
morning, occupying half the forenoon in getting to where his 
rays would reach the stream that ran through the Valley's cen- 
ter. Perpetual shadow reigned on the northern ^nd western 
taces of these towering hights — not enough warmth a.nd sun- 
shine reaching them in the cold montbi; to check the growth of 
the ever-lengthening icicles hanging from the jutting clilTs, or 
melt the arabesque frost-forms with which the many dasliing 
cascades decorated the adjacent rocks and shrubbery. Occa- 
sionally we would see where some little stream ran down over 
the face of the bare, black roclvs for many hundred feet, and 
then its course would be a long band of sheeny white, like a 
great rich, spotless scarf of satin, festooning the war-grimed 
walls of some old castle. 

Our duty now was to break up any nuclei of concentration 
that the Rebels might attempt to form, and to guard our for- 
agers — that is, the teamsters and employes of the Quartermas- 
ter's Department — who were loading grain into wagons and 
hauling it away. 

This last was aii arduous task. There is no man in the world 
that needs as much protection as an Army teamster. He is 
worse in this respect than a New England manufacturer, or an 



46 



ANDEKSONVILLa. 



old maid on her travels. He is given to sudden fears and 
causeless panics. Yery innocent cedars have a fashion of assum- 
ing in his eyes the appearance of desperate Rebels armed with 
murderous- guns, and there is no telling what moment a rock 
may take such a form as to freeze his young blood, and make 
each particidar hair stand on end like qtiills upon the fretful 
porcupine. One has to be particular about snapping caps m 
his neighborhood, and give to him careful warning before dis- 
charging a carbine to clean it. His first impulse, when any- 
thing occurs to jar upon his delicate nerves, is to cut his wheel 




A SOARED MULE DKTVEK. 

mule loose and retire with the precipitation of a man having an 
appointment to keep and being beliind time. There is no man 
who can get as much speed out of a mule as a teamster falling 
back from the neighborhood of heavj^ firing. 

This nervous tremor was not peculiar to the engineers of our 
transportation department. It was noticeable in the gentry 



A 8TOBY OF MILITABY BEBEL PKIS0N8. 47 

who carted the scanty provisions of tlie Rel)Gls. One of 
Wheeler's cavalrymen told me that the brigade to which he bo- 
longed was one evening ordered to move at daybreak. The night 
was rainy, and it was thought best to discharge the guns and 
reload before starting. Unfortunately, it was neglected to 
inform the teamsters of this, and at the first discharge they van- 
ished from the scene with such energy that it was over a week 
before the brigade succeeded in getting them back again. 

Why association with the mule should thus demoralize a man,. 
has always been a puzzle to me, for while the mule, as Col. 
IngersoU has remarked, is an animal without pride of ancestry 
or hope of posterity, he is still not a coward by any means. It 
is beyond dispute that a full-grown and active lioness once^ 
attacked a mule in the grounds of the Cincinnati Zoological 
Garden, and was ignominiously beaten, receiving injuries from 
which she died shortly afterward. 

The apparition of a badly-scared teamster urging one of his 
wheel mules at breaJi-neck speed over the rougii ground, yelling 
for protection against " them Johnnies," who had appeared on 
some hilltop in sight of where he was gathering corn, was an 
almost hourly occurrence. Of course the squad dispatched to 
his assistance found nobody. 

Still, there were plenty of liebels in the counti-y, and they 
hung around our front, exchanging shots with us at hmg taw, 
and occasionally treating us to a voUey at close range, from 
some favorable point. But we had the decided advantage of 
them at this game. Our Sharpens carbines were much superior 
in every way to their Eniields. They wouhi sl'-oot much far- 
ther, and a great deal more rapidlj'', so that the Virginians Avero 
not long in discovering that they were losing more than they 
gained in this useless warfare. 

Once they played a sharp practical joke upon us. Copper 
River is a deep, exceedingl}'- rapid mountain stream, with a very 
slippery rocky bottom. The Rebels blockaded a ford in such a 
way that it was almost impossible for a horse to keep his feet. 
Then they tolled us off in pursuit of a small party to this ford. 
When we came to it there was a light line of skirmishers on the 
opposite bank, who popped away at us industriously. Our boys 
formed in line, gave the customary cheer, and dashed in to carry 



48 ANDEB80NVLLLB. 

the ford at a chargo. As they tlid so at least one-half of the 
horses went down a-s if they were shot, and roiled over their 
riders in the swift running, ice-cold waters. The Rebels 3'elled 
a triumphant laugh, as they galloped away, and the laugh was 
re-echoed by our fellows, who were as quick to see the joke as 
the other side. "We tried to get even with them by a sharp 
chase, but we gave it up after a few miles, w^ithout having 
taken any prisoners. 

But, after all, there was much to make our sojourn in the 
Valley endurable. Though we did not wear line linen, we 
fared sumptuously — for soldiers — every day. The cavalryman 
is always charged by the infantry and artiUery with having a 
finer and surer scent for the good things in the country than 
any other man in the service. lie is believed to have an instinct 
that will unfailingly lead him, in the darkest night, to the 
roosting place of the most desirable poultr}'-, and after he has 
camped in a neighborhood for awhde it would require a close 
chemical analysis to find a trace of ham. 

TVe did our best to sustain the reputation of our arm of the 
■service. AVe found the most delicious hams packed away in the 
ash-houses. They were small, and had that j exquisite nutty 
flavor, peculiar to mast-fed bacon. Then there was an abund- 
ance of the delightful little apple knowm as " romanites." There 
were turnips, pum plans, cabbages, potatos, and the usual pro- 
ducts of the field in plenty, even profusion. The corn in the 
fields furnished an ample supply of breadstuif. AVe carried it 
to and ground it in the quaintest, rudest little mills that can be 
imagined outside of the primitive affairs by which the women 
of Arabia coarsely powder the grain for the family meal. 
Sometimes the nidi would consist only of four stout posts thrust 
into the ground at the edge of some stream. A line of boul- 
ders reaching diagonally across the stream answered for a dam> 
by diverting a portion of the volume of water to a channel at 
the side, where it moved a clumsily constructed wheel, that 
turned two small stones, not larger than good-sized grindstones. 
Over this would be a shed made by resting poles in forked 
posts stuck into the ground, and covering these with clapboards 
held in place by large flat stones. They resembled the mills of 
the gods — in grinding slowly. It used to seem that a healthy 
ni;in could eaL the meal faster than they ground it. 



A BTOKY OF KEBEL MILITARY PKIS0N8. 49 

x^ut what savory meals we used to concoct around the camp- 
fires, out of the rich materials collected during the day's ride I 
Such stews, such soups, such broils, such wonderful commix- 
tures of things diverse in nature and antagonistic in properties) 
such daring culinary experiments in combining materials never 
before attempted to be combined. The French say of untaste- 
ful arrangement of hues in dress — "that the colors swear at 
each other." I have often thought the same thing of the 
heterogeneities that go to make up a soldier's 2)ot-a-feu. 

But for all that they never failed to taste deliciously after a 
long day's ride. They Avere washed down by a tincupful of 
coffee strong enough to tan leather, then came a brier-wood 
pipeful of fragrant kinnildnnic, and a seat by the ruddy, spark- 
ling fire of aromatic cedar logs, that diffused at once warmth, 
and spic}^, pleasing incense. A chat over the events of the day, 
and the prospect of the morrow, the wonderful merits of each 
man's horse, and the disgusting irregularities of the mails from 
home, lasted until the silver-voiced bugle rang out the sweet, 
mournful tattoo of the Eegulations, to the flowing cadences of 
which the boys had arranged the absurdly incongruous words : 

" S-a-y — D-e-n-t-c-h-e-r-will-yoii fight-mit Sigel f 
Zwei-g)as8 of lager-bicr, jal jaf ja I 

"Words were fitted to all the calls, which generally bore some 
relativeness to the signal, but these were as destitute of con- 
gTuity as of sense. 

Tattoo alwa3^s produces an impression of extreme loneliness. 
As its weird, half -wailing notes ring out and are answered back 
from the distant rocks slirouded in night, and perhaps conceal- 
ing the lurking foe, the soldier remembers that he is far away 
from home and friends — deep in the enemy's country, encom- 
passed on every hand by those in deadly hostility to him, who 
are perhaps even then maturing the preparations for his destruc- 
tion. 

As the tattoo sounds, the bo3''s arise from around the fire, 
visit the horse Hue, see that their horses are securely tied, rub 
off from the fetlocks and legs such specks of mud as may have 
escaped the cleaning in the early evening, and if possible, smug- 
gle their faithful four-footed friends a few ears of corn, or 
another bunch of hay. , 



50 



AiJDERSONVILLE. 



If not too tired, and everything else is favorable, the cavalry- 
man lias prepared liimself a comfortable couch for the night. 
He always sleeps with a chum. The two have gathered enough 
small tufts of pine or cedar to make a comfortable, springy, 
mattress-like foundation. On this is laid the poncho or rubber 
blanl:et. Next comes one of their overcoats, and upon this 
they he, covering themselves with the two blankets and the 
other overcoat, their feet towards the fire, their boots at the 
foot, and their belts, with revolver, saber and carbine, at the 
sides of the bed. It is suqjrising what an amount of comfort 
a man can get out of such a couch, a,nd how, at an alarm, he 
springs from it, almost instantly dressed and armed. 




BUGLEK SOUNDING " TAPS." 



A 8TOKY OF EEBKL MILITABT PBIB0N8. 



61 



Half an hour after tattoo the bugle rings out another sadly 
Bweet strain, that hath a dying sound : 



TAPS. 



f if f ni -= ^-^ 




Iri-g-h-t-0 0-n-t! L-i-g-h-Vs 0-u-tl Lights ont, lights out— for-th« 



:^ 



tf—i"^ 



T 



^M 



ft4i(-h-t I lighta outi For tbe n-i-g-h-t. For-the n-i^s-b4. 



CHAPTEK lY. 

A BITTER COLD MORNING AND A WARM AWAKENING TEOUBLK ALL 

ALONG THE LINE FIERCE CONFLICTS, j^SSAULTS AND DEFENSE 

PROLONGED AND DESPERATE STRUGGLE ENDING WITH A SUKREA'DER. 

The night had been the most intensely cold that the country 
had known for many years. Peach and other tender trees had 
been killed by the frosty rigor, and sentinels had been frozen to 
death in our neighborhood. The deep snow on which we made 
our beds, the icy covering of the streams near us, the limbs of 
the trees above us, had been cracldng with loud noises all night, 
from the bitter cold. 

We were camped around Jonesville, each of the four compa- 
nies lying on one of the roads leading from the town. Com- 
pany L lay about a mile from the Com-t House. On a Imoll at 
the end of the village toward us, and at a point where two 
roads separated, — one of which led to us, — stood a three-mch 
Rodman rifle, belonging to the Twenty-second Ohio Battery. 
It and its squad of eighteen men, under command of Lieutenant 
Alger and Sergeant Davis, had been sent up to us a few days 
before from the Gap. 

The comfortless gray dawn was crawling sluggishly over the 
mountain-tops, as if numb as the animal and vegetable life 
which had been shrinking all the long hours under the fierce 
chill. 

The Major's bugler had saluted the morn with the lively, 
ringing t-a-r-r-r-a-ta-a-a of the Regulation reveille, and the com- 
pany buglers, as fast as they could thaw out their mouth-pieces, 
were answering him. 

I lay on my bed, dreading to get up, and yet not anxious to lie 



A 8TOBY OF KEBKL MILITAKY PKI80N8. 63 

still. It was a question which would be the more uncomforta- 
ble. I turned over, to see if there was not another position in 
which it would be warmer, and began wishing for the thou- 
sandth time that the efforts for the amelioration of the horrors 
of warfare would progress to such a point as to put a stop to 
all "Winter soldiering, so that a fellow could go home as soon as 
cold weather began, sit around a comfortable stove in a country 
store, and tell camp stories until the Spring was far enough 
advanced to let him go back to the front wearing a straw hat 
and a hnen duster. 

Then I began wondering how much longer I would dare he 
there, before the Orderly Sergeant would draw me out by the 
heels, and accompany the operation with numerous unkind and 
sulphurous remarks. 

This cogitation was abruptly terminated by hearing an 
excited shout from the Captain : 

''Turn Out ! — Company L ! ! TUIIN OUT ! ! ! " 

Almost at the same instant rose that shrill, piercing Rebel 
yell, which one Avho has once heard it rarely forgets, and this 
was followed by a crashing volley from apparently a regiment 
of rifles. 

I arose — promptly. 

There was evidently something of more interest on hand than 
the weather. 

Cap, overcoat, boots and revolver belt went on, and eyes 
opened at about the same instant. 

As I snatched up my carbine, I looked out in front, and the 
whole woods appeared to be full of Rebels, rushing toward us, 
all yelhng and some firing. My Captain and First Lieutenant 
had taken up position on the right front of the tents, and part 
of the boys were running up to form a line alongside them. 
The Second Lieutenant had stationed himself on a knoll on the 
left front, and about a third of the company was rallying 
around him. 

My chum was a silent, sententious sort of a chap, and as we 
ran forward to the Captain's line, he remarked earnestly : 

"WeU: tills beats hell ! " 

I thought he had a clear idea of the situation. 

All this occupied an inappreciably short space of time. The 



64 



ANDERSONTILLE. 



Rebels had not stopped to reload, but were rushing impetuously 
toward us. We gave them a hot, rolling volley from our car- 
bines. Many fell, more stopped to load and reply, but the mass 







COMPAQ r L GATHERING TO MEET THE REBEL ATTACK. 

surged straight forward at us. Then our fire grew so deadly 
that they showed a disposition to cover themselves behind the 
rocks and trees. Again they were urged forward, and a body 
of them headed by their Colonel, mounted on a white horse, 
pushed forwai'd through the gap between us and the Second 
Lieutenant. The Rebel Colonel dashed up to the Second Lieu- 
tenant, and ordered him to surrender. The latter — a gallant 
old gray beard — cm"sed the Rebel bitterly and snapped his now 
empty revolver in his face. The Colonel fired and killed him, 
whereupon his squad, with two of its Sergeants killed and half 
its numbers on the ground, surrendered. 
The Rebels in our front and flank pressed us with equal close- 



A BTORY OF KEBEL MILITARY PRISONS. 55 

fless. It seemed as if it was absolutely impossible to check 
their rush for an instant, and as Tve saw the fate of our com- 
panions the Captain gave the word for every man to look out 
for himself. We ran back a little distance, sprang over the 
fence into the fields, and rushed toward Town, the Rebels en- 
couraging us to make good time by a sharp fire into our backs 
from the fence. 

While we Avere vainly attempting to stem the onset of the 
column dashed against us, better success was secured elsewhere. 
Another column swept down the other road, upon which there 
was only an outlying picket. This had to come back on the 
run before the overwlielming numbers, and the Rebels galloped 
straight for the three-inch Rodman. Company M was the first to 
get saddled and mounted, and now came up at a steady, swinging 
gallop, in two platoons, saber and revolver in hand, and led by 
two Sergeants — Key and McWright, — printer boys from 
Bloomington, Illinois. They divined the object of the Rebel 
dash, and strained every nerve to reach the gun first. The 
Rebels were too near, and got the gun and turned it. Before 
they could fire it. Company M struck them headlong, but they 
took the terrible impact without flinching, and for a few min- 
utes there was fierce hand-to-hand work, with sword and pistol. 
The Rebel leader sank under a half-dozen simultaneous wounds, 
and fell dead almost under the gun. Men dropped from 
their horses each instant, and the riderless steeds lied away. 
The scale of victory was turned by the Major dashing against 
the Rebel left flank at the head of Company I, and a portion of 
the artillery squad. The Rebels gave ground slowlj^, and were 
packed into a dense mass in the lane up which they had charged. 
After they had been crowded back, say fifty yards, word was 
passed tlu'ough our men to open to the right and left on the 
sides of the road. The artillerymen had turned the gun and 
loaded it ■with a solid shot. Instantly a wide lane opened 
through our ranlcs ; the man with the lanyard drew the fatal 
cord, fire burst from the primer and the muzzle, the long gun 
sprang up and recoiled, and there seemed to be a demoniac yell in 
its ear-sphtting crash, as the heav}^ ball left the mouth, and tore 
its bloody way through the bodies of the strugghng mass of 
men and horses. 



5^ AKDKRiJONVLLLB. 

This ended it. The Eebels gave way in disorder, and our 
men fell back to give the gun an opportunity to thi^ow shell and 
canister. 

The Eebels now saw that we were not to be run over like a 
field of cornstalks, and they fell back to devise further tactics, 
giving us a breathing spell to get ourselves in shape for defense. 

The dullest could see that we were in a desperate situation. 
Critical positions were no new experience to us, as they never 
are to a cavalry command after a few months in the field, but, 
though the pitcher goes often to the well, it is broken at last, 
and our time was evidently at hand. The narrow throat of the 
Yalley, through which lay the road back to the Gap, was held 
by a force of Rebels evidently much superior to our own, and 
strongly posted. The road was a slender, tortuous one, wind- 
ing througli rocks and gorges. Xo where was there room 
enough to move with even a platoon front against the enemy, 
and this precluded all chances of cutting out. The best we 
could do was a sIoav, difiicult movement, in column of fours, and 
this would have been suicide. On the other side of the To^vn 
the Eebels were massed stronger, while to the right and left 
rose the steep mountain sides. We were caught — tra})ped as 
surely as a rat ever was in a wu'c trap. 

As we learned afterwards, a whole division of cavalry, under 
command of the noted Eebel, Major General Sam Jones, had 
been sent to effect our capture, to olFset in a measure Long- 
street's repulse at Knoxville. A gross overestimate of our 
numbers had caused the sending of so large a force on this 
errand, and the rough treatment we gave the two columns that 
attacked us first confirmed the Eebel General's ideas of our 
strength, and led him to adopt cautious tactics, instead of crush- 
ing us out speedily, by a determined advance of all parts of his. 
encircling lines. . 

The lull in the fight did not last long. A portion of the 
Eebel line on the east rushed forward to gain a more com- 
manding position. "We concentrated m that direction and 
drove it back, the Eodman assisting with a couple of well-aimed 
shells. This was followed by a similar but more successful 
attempt by another part of the Eebel line, and so it went on 
all day — the Eebels rushing up first on this side, and then oa 



A 6T0RY OF BEBEL MHJTABT PKIS0N8. 67 

that, and we, hastily collecting at the exposed points, seeking 
to drive them back. We were frequently successful ; we were 
on the inside, and had the advantage of the short interior lines, 
so that our few men and our breech-loaders told to a good pur- 
pose. 

There were frequent crises in the struggle, that at some times 
gave encouragement, but never hope. Once a determined onset 
was made from the East, and was met by the equally deter- 
mined resistance of nearly our whole force. Our Qre was so 
galhng that a large number of our foes crowded into a house 
on a knoll, and making loopholes in its walls, began replying to 
us pretty sharply. We sent word to our faithful artillerists, 
who trained the gun upon the house. The first shell screamed 
over the roof, and burst harmlessly beyond. We suspended fire 
to watch the next. It crashed through the side ; for an instant 
all was deathly still ; we thought it had gone on through. Then 
came a roar and a crash ; the clapboards flew olF the roof, and 
smoke poured out ; panic-stricken Rebels rushed from the doors 
and sprang from the windows — like bees from a disturbed 
hive; the shell had burst among the confined mass of men 
inside I We afterwards heard that twenty-live were killed 
there. 

At another time a considerable force of Ptcbels gained the 
cover of a fence in easy range of our main force. Companies 
L and K were ordered to charc:e forward on foot and dislod^fe 
them. Away we went, under a fire that seemed to drop a man 
at every step. A hundred yards in front of the Rebels was a 
little cover, and behind this our men lay down as if by one 
impulse. Then came a close, desperate duel at short range. It 
was a question between Northern pluck and Southern courage, 
as to which could stand the most punishment. Lying as flat 
as possible on the crusted snow, only raising the head or body 
enough to load and aim, the men on both sides, with their teeth 
set, their glaring eyes fastened on the foe, their nerves as tens© 
as tightly-drawn steel wires, rained shot on each other as fast 
as excited hands could crowd cartridges into the guns and dis^ 
charge them. 

l:Tot a word was said. 

The shallower enthusiasm that expresses itself in oaths and 



58 AITDEKS02^VILLE. 

shouts had given way to the deep, voiceless rage of men in a 
death grapple. The Eebel hne was a rolling torrent of flame, 
their bullets shrieked angrily as they flew past, they struck the 
snow in front of us, and threw its cold flakes in laces that were 
white with the fires of consuming hate ; they buried themselves 
with a dull thud in the quivering bodies of the enraged combat- 
ants. 

Minutes passed ; they seemed hours. 

"Would the villains, scoundrels, hell-hounds, sons of vipers 
never go ? 

At length a few Eebels sprang up and trietl to fly. They 
were shot do^Ti instantly. 

Then the whole hne rose and ran 1 

The relief was so great that we jumped to our feet and 
cheered wfldly, forgetting in our excitement to make use of 
our victory by shooting down our flying enemies. 

Nor was an element of fun lacking. A Second Lieutenant 
was ordered to take a party of skirmishers to the top of a hill 
and engage those of the llebels stationed on another hill-top 
across a ravine. lie had but lately joined us from the Regular 
Army, where he was a Drill Sergeant. Naturally, he Avas very 
methodical in his way, and scorned to do otherwise under fire 
than he would upon the parade ground. He moved his httle 
command to the hill-top, in close order, and faced them to the 
front. The Johnnies received them with a yell and a volley, 
whereat the boys winced a little, much to the Lieutenant's dis- 
gust, who swore at them ; then had them count off with great 
deliberation, and deployed them as coolly as if there was not 
an enemy within a hundred miles. After the line deployed, 
he "dressed" it, commanded " ^rowi! .^ " wn.d'''- Begiiijiring!" 
His attention was called another way for an instant, and when 
he looked back again, there was not a man of his nicely formed 
skirmish Hne visible. The logs and stones had evidently been 
put there for the use of skirmishers, the boys thought, and in 
an instant they availed themselves of their shelter. 

Never was there an angrier man than that Second Lieutenant ; 
he brandished his saber and swore ; he seemed to feel that all 
his soldierly reputation was gone, but the boys stuck to their 
shelter for aU that, informing him that when the Eebels would 



A BTOBT OF KEBEL MILITAliT PBIB0N8. 



59 



stand out in the open field and take their fire, they would do 
hkewise. 

Despite all our efforts, the Eebel line crawled up closer and 
closer to us ; we were driven back from knoll to knoll, and from 
one fence after another. We had maintained the unequal 
struggle for eight hours ; over one-f oui-th of our number were 
stretched upon the snow, killed or badly wounded. Our cart- 
ridges were nearly all gone ; the cannon had fired its last shot 
long ago, and having a blanli: cartridge left, had sliot the ram- 
mer at a gathering party of tlie enemy. 

Just as the Winter sun was going down upon a day of gloom, 
the bugle called us all up on the hillside. Then the Eebels saw 
for the first time how few there were, and began an almost 
simultaneous charge all along the line. The Major raised a 
piece of a shelter tent upon a pole. The Une halted. An officer 
rode out from it, followed by two privates. 




THE MAJOR REFUSES TO SURRENDER. 

Approaching the Major, he said, " Who is in command of 
this force?" 
The Major repUed : " I am." 



) . 



60 ASDKS80NVILLK. 

" Then, Sir, I demand your sword." 

" What is your rank, sir?" 

" I am Adjutant of the Sixty-fourth Virginia." 

The punctillious soul of the old " Regular " — for such the Ma- 
jor was — swelled up instantly, and ho answered : 

" By , sir, I will never surrender to my inferior in rank 1 " 

The Adjutant reined his horse back. His two followers lev- 
eled their pieces at the Major and ^vaited orders to fh-e. They 
were covered by a dozen carbines in the hands of our men. The 
Adjutant ordered his men to " recover arms," and rode away 
with them. lie presently returned with a Colonel, and to him 
the Major handed his saber. 

As the men realized what vras being done, the first thought 
of many of them was to snatch out the cylinders of their revol- 
vers, and the slides of their carbines, and throw them away, so 
as to make the arms useless. 

TVe were overcome with raire and hmnihation at boino; com- 
pelled to yield to an enemy whom we had hated so bitterly. 
As we stood there on the bleak mountain-side, the biting wind 
soughing through the leafless branches, the shadows of a 
gloomy winter night closing around us, the groans and shrieks 
of our wounded mingling with the triumphant yells of the 
Eobels plundering our tents, it seemed as if Fate could press to 
mon'iS lips no cup with bitterer di-egs in it than this. 



CHAPTEE V. 

THE EEAOTIOM — DKPRHSSION — BITINO COLD — 8HAEP HUNGEK AKD 
SAD EEFLECTION. 

" Of being taken by the Insolent toe."— Othello. 

The night that followed was inexpressibly dreary. The high- 
wrought nervous tension, which had been protracted through the 
long hours that the figlit lasted, was succeeded by a propor- 
tionate mental depression, such as naturally follows any strain 
upon the mind. This was intensified in our cases by the sharp 
sting of defeat, the humiliation of having to yield ourselves, 
our horses and our arms into the possession of the enemy, the 
uncertainty as to the future, and the sorrow we felt at the loss 
of so many of our comrades. 

Company L had suffered very severely, but our chief regret 
was for the gallant Osgood, our Second Lieutenant. lie, above 
all others, was our trusted leader. The Captain and First Lieu- 
tenant were brave men, and good enough soldiers, but Osgood 
was the one " whose adoption tried, we grappled to our souls 
with hooks of steel." There Avas never any difficulty in get- 
ting all the volunteers he wanted for a scouting party. A quiet, 
pleasant spoken gentleman, past middle age, he looked much 
better fitted for the office of Justice of the Peace, to which his 
fellow-citizens of Urbana, Illinois, had elected and re-elected 
him, than to command a troop of rough riders in a great civil 
war. But none more gallant than he ever vaulted into saddle 
to do battle for the right. He went into the Army solely as a 
matter of principle, and did his duty with the unflagging zeal 
of an olden Puritan fighting for liberty and his soul's salvation. 
He was a superb horseman — as all the older Illinoisans are — 



62 ANDEESONVILLE. 

and, for all his two-score years and ten, he recognized few 
superiors for strength and activity in the Battalion. A radical, 
uncompromising Abolitionist, he had frequently asserted that 
he -would rather die than jdeld to a Kebel, and he kept his 
word in this as in ever}'thing else. 

As for him, it was probably the way he desired to die. No 
one believed more ardently than he that 

Whether on the scaffold high. 

Or in the battle's van; 
The fittest place for man to dla, 

Is where he dies for man. 

Among the many who had lost chums and friends was Ned 
Johnson, of Company K. Ned was a young Englishman, with 
much of the suggestiveness of the bull-dog common to the 
lower class of that nation. His fist was readier than his tongue. 
His chum, Walter Savage was of the same surly type. The 
two had come from England twelve yoars before, and had been 
together ever since. Savage was kUled in the struggle for the 
fence described in the preceding chapter. Ned could not real- 
ize for a while that his friend was dead. It was only when the 
body rapidly stiffened on its icy bed, and the eyes which had 
been gleaming deadly hate when he Avas stricken down were 
glazed over with the dull film of death, that he believed he was 
gone from him forever. Then his rage was terrible. For the 
rest of the day he was at the head of every assault upon the 
enemy. His voice could ever be heard above the firing, cursing 
the Eebels bitterly, and urging the boys to " Stand up to 'em 1 

Stand right up to 'em ! Don't give a inch ! Let the 

have the best you got in the shop ! Shoot low, and 

don't waste a cartridge ! " 

"When we surrendered, Ned seemed to yield sullenly to the 
inevitable. He threw his belt and apparently his revolver Avith 
it upon the snow. A guard was formed around us, and we 
gathered about the fires that were started. Ned sat apart, his 
arms folded, his head upon his breast, brooding bitterly upon 
Walter's death. A horseman, evidently a Colonel or General, 
clattered up to give some directions concerning us. At the 
sound of his voice Ned raised his head and gave him a swift 
glance ; the gold stars upon the KebeFs collar led him to believe 



A STORY OF KEBEL MILn'AHY PRISONS, 



63 



that ho was the commander of the enemy. Ned sprang to his 
feet, made a long stride forward, snatched from the breast of 
his overcoat the revolver he had been hiding there, cocked it 




ITED JOHNSON TRYING TO KILL THE REBEL COLONEL. 



and leveled it at the Rebel's breast. Beforo he could pull the 
trigger Orderly Sergeant Charles Bentley, of his Company, 
who was Avatching him, leaped forward, caught his wrist and 
threw the revolver up. Others joined in, took the weapon 
away, and handed it over to the officer, who then ordered us all 
to be searched for arms, and rode away. 

All our dejection could not make us forget that we were 
intensely hungry. "We had eaten nothing all day. The fight 
began before we had time to get any breakfast, and of course 
thertj was no interval for refreshments during the engagement. 
The Rebels were no better off than we, having been marched 
rapidly all night in order to come upon us by daylight. 

Late in the evening a few sacks of meal were given us, and 
we took the first lesson in an art that long and painful practice 
afterward was to make very familiar to us. We had nothing 
to mix the meal in, and it looked as if we would have to eat it 



'64 AJTOKRSONVILLK. 

dry, until a happy thought struck some one that our caps would 
do for kneading troughs. At once every cap was devoted to 
this. Getting water from an adjacent spring, each man made 
a nttle wad of dough — unsalted — and, spreading it upon a fiat 
stone or a chip, set it up in front of the fire to bake. As soon 
as it was browned on one side, it was pulled off the stone, and 
the other side turned to the fire. It was a very primitive way 
of cooking and I became thoroughly disgusted with it. It was 
fortunate for me that I little dreamed that this was the way I 
should have to get my meals for the next fifteen months. 

After somewhat of the edge had been taken off our hunger 
by this food, we crouched around the fires, talked over the 
events of the day, speculated as to what was to be done with 
us, and snatched such sleep &a the biting cold would permit. 



CHAPTER YL 

" ON TO EICHMOND 1 " — MARCHrNO ON FOOT OVER THE MOUNTAINS 

MY HORSE HAS A NEW RIDER — UNSOPHISTICATED MOUNTAIN 

GIRLS DISCUSSING THE ISSUES OF THE WAR PARTING WITH 

" HIATOOA." 

At (lawn we were gathered together, more meal issued to 
us, which we cooked in the same way, and then were started 
under heavy guard to march on foot over the mountains to 
Bristol, a station at the point where the Virginia and Tennessee 
Railroad crosses the line between Yirginia and Tennessee. 

As we were preparing to set out a Sergeant of the First Vir- 
ginia cavalry came galloping up to us on my horse ! The sight 
of my faithful " Hiatoga " bestrid by a Rebel, Avrung my heart. 
During the action I had forgotten him, but when it ceased I 
began to worry about his fate. As he and his rider came near 
I called out to him ; he stopped and gave a whinny of recog- 
nition, which seemed also a plaintive appeal for an explanation 
of the changed condition of affairs. 

The Sergeant was a pleasant, gentlemanly boy of about my 
own age. lie rode up to me and inquired if it was my horse, to 
which I replied in the affirmative, and asked permission to take 
from the saddle pockets some letters, pictures and other trink- 
ets. He granted this, and we became friends from thence on 
until we separated. lie rode by my side as we plodded over 
the steep, slippery hills, and we beguiled the way by chatting 
of the thousand things that soldiers liud to tallv about, and ex- 
changed reminiscences of the service on both sides. Lut the 
subject he was fondest of was that which I relished least : my 
— now his — horse. Into the open ulcer of my heart he poui-ed 
5 



66 AITDEKSONVILLK. 

the acid of all manner of questions concerning my lost steed's 

qualities and capabilities : would he swim ? how was he in ford- 
ing ? did ho jump weU ? how did he stand fire ? I smothered 
my irritation, and answered as pleasantly as I could. 

In the afternoon of the third day after the capture, we came 
up to where a party of rustic belles were collected at " quilt 
ing." The "Yankees" were instantly objects of greater inter- 
est than the parade of a menagerie would have been. The Ser- 
geant told the girls we were going to camp for tlie night a mile 
or so ahead, and if they would be at a certain house, he would 
have a Yankee for them for close inspection. After halting, 
the Sergeant obtained leave to take me out with a guard, and 
I was presently ushered into a room in which the damsels were 
massed in force, — a carnation-cheeked, staring, open-mouthed, 
linsey-clad crowd, as ignorant of corsets and gloves as of Ile- 
brew, and with a propensity to giggle that was chronic and 
iri'epressible. "When we entered the room there was a general 
giggle, and then a shower of comments upon my appeai-ance, 
— each sentence punctuated with the chorus of feminine caclii- 
nation. A remark was made about my hair and eyes, and 
their risibles gave way ; judgment was passed on my nose, and 
then came a ripple of laughter. I got very red in the face, and 
uncomfortable generally. Attention was called to the size of 
my feet and hands, and the usual chorus followed. Those use- 
ful members of my body seemed to swell up as they do to a 
young man at his first party. 

Then I saw that in the minds of these bucolic maidens I ^vas 
scarcely, if at all, human ; they did not understand that I be- 
longed to the race ; I was " a Yankee " — a something of the 
non-human class, as the gorilla or the chimpanzee. They felt 
as free to discuss my points before my face as they would to 
talk of a horse or a \vild animal in a show. My equanimity 
was partially restored by this reflection, but I was still too 
young to escape embarrassment and irritation at being thus 
dissected and giggled at by a party of girls, even if they 
were ignorant Virginia mountaineers. 

I turned around to speak to the Sergeant, and m so doing 
showed my back to the ladies. The hum of comment deepened 
into surprise, that half stopped and then intensified the giggle. 



I 



▲ BTOEY OF EEBEL MILITAEY PRISONS. 



67 



I was puzzled for a minute, and then the direction of their 
glances, and their remarks explained it all. At the rear of the 
lower part of the cavalry jacket, about where the upper orna- 
mental buttons are on the tail of a frock coat, are two funny 
tabs, about the size of small pin-cushions. They are fastened 
by the edge, and stick out straight behind. Their use is to sup- 
port the heavy belt in the rear, as the buttons do in front. 
When the belt is off it would puzzle the Seven Wise Men to 
guess what they are for. The unsophisticated young ladies, 
with that swift intuition which is one of lovely woman's salient 
mental traits, immediately jumped at the conclusion that the 
projections covered some peculiar conformation of the Tanlcee 
anatomy — some incipient, dromedary-Iil^e humps, or perchance 
the horns of which they had heard so much. 




6IBL8 ASTONISHED AT THE JACKET TABS.' 

This anatomical phenomena was discussed intently for a few 
minutes, during which I heard one of the gu'ls inquire whether 
" it would hurt him to cut 'em off ? " and another hazarded the 
opinion that " it would probably bleed him to death." 



68 ANDEESONVILLK. 

Then a new idea seized them, and they said to the Sergeant : 

" Make him smg ! Make him sing ! " 

This was too much for the Sergeant, who had been intensely 
amused at the girls' wonderment, lie turned to me, very rwl 
in the face, with : 

" Sergeant : the girls want to hear you sing." 

I rephed that I could not sing a note. Said he : 

" Oh, come now. I know better than that ; I never seed or 
heerd of a Yankee that couldn't sinij." 

I nevertheless assured him that there really were some Yan- 
kees that did not have Vinj musical accomplishments, and that 
I was one of that unfortunate number. I asked him to get the 
ladies to sing for me, and to this they acceded quite readily. 
One girl, with a fair soprano, who seemed to be the leader of 
the crowd, sang " The Homespun Dress," a song very popular 
in the South, and having the same tune as the " Bonnie Blue 
Flag." It began 

I envy not the Northern giria 
Their sDka and jewels fine, 

and proceeded to compare the homespun habiliments of the 
Southern women to the finery and frippery of the ladies on 
the other side of Mason and Dixon's line in a manner very dis- 
advantageous to the latter. 

The rest of the girls made a fine exhibition of the lung-power 
acquired in chmbing their precipitous mountains, when they 
came in on the chorus : 

Hurra 1 Hurra 1 for Southern rights hurr» 1 
Hurra for the homespun dress, 
The Southern ladies wear. 

This ended the entertainment. 

On our journey to Bristol we met many Rebel soldiers, of all 
ranks, and a small number of citizens. As the conscription had 
then been enforced pretty sharply for over a year the only 
able-bodied men seen in civil life were those who had some 
trade which exempted them from being forced into active ser- 
vice. It greatly astonished us at first to find that nearly all 
the mechanics were included among the exempts, or could be if 
they chose ; but a very little reflection showed us the wisdom 
of such a policy. The South is, as nearly a purely agricultural 



A STOEY OF EEBKL MILITAEY PRISONS. 69 

country as is Eussia or South America. Tiie people have little 
inclination or capacity for anything else than pastoral pursuits. 
Consequently mechanics are very scarce, and manufactories 
much scarcer. The limited quantity of products of mechanical 
skill needed by the people was mostly imported from the North 
or Europe. Both these sources of supply were cut off by the 
war, and the country was thrown upon its own slender manu- 
facturing resources. To force its mechanics into the army would 
therefore be suicidal. The Army would gain a few thousand 
men, but its operations would be embarrassed, if not stopped 
altogether, by a want of supplies. This condition of affairs 
reminded one of the singular paucity of mechanical skill among 
the Bedouins of the desert, which renders the life of a black- 
smith sacred. jS"o matter how bitter the feud between tribes, 
no one will kill the other's workers of iron, and instances are 
told of warriors saving their lives at critical periods by falling 
on their knees and maldng with their garments an imitation of 
the action of a smith's bellows. 

All whom we met were eager to discuss with- us the causes, 
phases and progress of the war, and whenever opportunity 
offered or could be made, those of us who were inclined to talk 
were speedily involved in an argument with crowds of soldiers 
and citizens. But, owing to the polemic poverty of our oppo- 
nents, the argument was more in name than in fact. Like all 
people of slender or untrained intellectual powers they labored 
under the hallucination that asserting was reasoning, and the 
emphatic reiteration of bald statements, logic. The narrow 
round which all — from highest to lowest — traveled was some- 
times comical, and sometimes irritating, according to one's 
mood. The dispute invariably began by their aslcing : 

"Well, what are you 'uns down here a-fightin' we 'uns for?" 

As this was replied to the next one followed : 

" Why are you 'uns takin' our niggers away from we 'uns for ? " 

Then came : 

"What do you 'uns put our niggers to fightin' we 'uns for?" 

The wind-up always was : " Well, let me tell you, sir, you 
can never whip people that are fighting for liberty, sir." 

Even General Giltner, who had achieved considerable military 
reputation as commander of a division of Kentucky cavalry, 



70 



AITDEKSONVILLB, 



seemed to be as slende-rly furnished with logical ammunition 
as the balance, for as he halted by us he opened the conve^- 
ation with the well-worn formula : 

'' Well : what are 3^ou 'uns down here a-iighting we 'uns for 1 " 

Tlie question had become raspingly monotonous to me, whom 
he addressed, and I replied with marked acerbity : 

" Because we are the Northern mudsills whom you affect to 
despise, and we came down here to lick you into resj>ecting us." 

Tlie answer seemed to tickle him, a pleasanter light came into 
his sinister gray eyes, he laughed lightly, and bade us a kindly 
good day. 

Four days after our capture we arrived in Bristol. The 
guards who had brought us over the mountains were relieved by 
others, the Sergeant bade me good by, struck his spurs into 
" Iliatoga's" sides, and he and my faithful horse were soon lost 
to view in the darkness. 

A new and keener sense of desolation came over me at the 
final separation from my tried and true four-footed friend, who 
had been my constant companion through so many perils and 
hardships. We had endured together the Winter's cold, the 
dispiriting drench of the rain, the fatigue of the long march, 
the discomforts of the muddy camp, the gripings of hunger, 
the weariness of the drill and re\aew, the perils of the vidette 
post, the courier service, the scout and the fight. We had 
shared in common 

The whips and scorns of time, 

The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contnmelj, 

The insolence of office, and the gpurus 

which a patient private and his horse of the unworthy take ; we 

had had our frequently recurring 
rows with other fellows and their 
horses, over questions of prece- 
dence at watering places, and 
grass-plots, had had lively tilts 
with guards of forage piles in sur- 
rej^titious attempts to get addi- 
tional rations, sometimes coming 
off victorious, and sometimes beins' 




OOOD-BTB TO " HIATOGA." 

driven off ingloriously. 



I had often gone hungry that he might 



A STORY OF EEBEL MILITABT PRISONS. 71 

have the only ear of corn obtainable. I am not skilled enough 
in horse lore to speak of his points or pedigree. I only know 
that his strong limbs never failed me, and that he "waa 
always ready for duty and ever willing. 

Now at last our paths diverged. I was retired from actual 
service to a prison, and he bore his new master off to battle 
against his old friends. 

*** * * * **»* 

Packed closely in old, dilapidated stock and box cars, as if 
cattle in shipment to market, we pounded along slowly, and 
apparently interminably, toward the Rebel capital. 

The railroads of the South were already in very bad condi- 
tion. They were never more than passably good, even in their 
best estate, but now, with a large part of the skilled men 
engaged upon them escaped back to the North, with all 
renewal, improvement, or any but the most necessary repairs 
stopped for three years, and with a marked absence of even 
ordinary skill and care in their management, they were as 
nearly ruined as they could well be and still run. 

One of the severe embarrassments under which the roads 
labored was a lack of oil. There is very little fatty matter of 
any kind in the South. The climate and the food plants do 
not favor the accumulation of adipose tissue by animals, and 
there is no other source of supply. Lard oil and tallow were 
very scarce and held at exorbitant prices. 

Attempts were made to obtain lubricants from the peanut 
and the cotton seed. 'The first yielded a fine bland oil, resem- 
bling the ordinary grade of olive oil, but it was entirely too ex- 
pensive for use in the arts. The cotton seed oil could be pro- 
duced much cheaper, but it had in it such a quantity of gummy 
Diatter as to render it worse than useless for emplojTnent on 
machinery. 

This scarcity of oleaginous matter produced a corresponding 
scarcity of soap and similar detergents, but this was a depriva- 
tion which caused the Rebels, as a whole, as little inconvenience 
as any that they suffered from. I have seen many thousands 
of them who were obviously greatly in need of soap, but if 
they were rent mth any suffering on that account they con- 
cealed it with marvelous self-control. 



TC iLNDEEBONVILLE. 

There seemed to be a scanty supply of oil provided for the loco- 
motives, but the cars had to run with unlubricated axles, and the 
screaking and groaning of the grinding journals in the dry 
boxes "was sometimes almost deafening, especially when we 
were going around a curve. 

Our engine went off the wretched track several times, but as 
she was not running much faster than a man could walk, the 
worst consequence to us was a severe jolting. She was small, 
and was easily pried back upon the track, and sent again upon 
her wheezy, straining way. 

The depression which had weighed us down for a night and a 
day after our capture had now been succeeded by a more cheer- 
ful fcehng. "We began to look upon our condition as the for- 
tiine of war, We were proud of our resistance to overwhelm- 
ing numbers. "We Imew we had sold ourselves at a price which, 
if the Rebels had it to do over again, they would not pay for 
us. We beheved that we had killed and seriously wounded as 
many of them as they had killed, wounded and captured of ils. 
We had nothing to blame ourselves for. Moreover, we began 
to bo buoyed up with the expectation that we would be ex- 
changcil immediately upon our arrival at Eichmond, and the 
Eebei ollicers confidently assured us that this would be so. 
There was then a temporary hitch in the exchange, but it would 
all bo straightened out in a few days, and it might not be a 
month untd we were again marching out of Cumberland Gap, 
on an avenging foray against some of the force which had assisted 
in our capture. 

Fortunately for this delusive hopefulness there was no weird 
and boding Cassandra to pierce the veil of the future for us, 
and reveal the length and the ghastly horror of the Yalley of 
the Shadow of Death, through which we must pass for hun- 
dreds of sad days, stretching out into long months of suffering 
and death. ILappily there was no one to tell us that of every 
five in that party four would never stand under the Stars and 
Stripes again, but succumbing to chronic starvation, long-con- 
tinued exposm'e, the bullet of the brutal guard, the loathsome 
scurvy, the hideous gangrene, and the heartsickness of hope 
deferred, would find respite from pain low in the barren sands 
of that hungry Southern soil. 



A STORY OF REBEL MILITAET PKIS0N8. 73 

"Were every doom foretokened by appropriate omens, the 
ravens along our route would have croaked themselves hoarse. 

But, far from being oppressed by any presentiment of com- 
ing evil, we began to appreciate and enjoy the picturesque 
grandeur of the scenery through which we were moving. The 
rugged sternness of the Appalachian mountain range, in whose 
rock-ribbed heart we had fought our losing fight, was now soft- 
ening into less strong, but more graceful outlines as we ap- 
proached the pine-clad, sandy plains of the seaboard, upon 
which Ilichmond is buUt. We were skirting along the eastern 
base of the great Blue Ridge, about whose distant and lofty 
summits hung a perpetual veil of deep, dark, but translucent 
blue, which refracted the slanting rays of the morning and 
evening sun into masses of color more gorgeous than a dreamer's 
vision of an enchanted land. At Lynchburg we saw the famed 
Peaks of Otter — twenty miles away — lifting their proud 
heads far into the clouds, lilve giant watch-towers sentineling 
the gateway that the mighty waters of the James had forced 
through the barriers of solid adamant lying across their path to 
the far-off sea. "What we had seen many miles back start from 
the mountain sides as slender rivulets, brawling over the worn 
boulders, were now great, rushing, full-tide streams, enough of 
them in any fifty miles of our journey to furnish water power 
for all the factories of Kew England. Their amazing opulence 
of mechanical energy has lain unutilized, almost unnoticed, in 
the two and one-half centuries that the white man has dwelt 
near them, while in Massachusetts and her near neighbors every 
rill that can turn a wheel has been put into harness and forced 
to do its share of labor for the benefit of the men who have 
made themselves its masters. 

Ilere is one of the differences between the two sections : In 
the North man was set free, and the elements made to do his 
work. In the South man was the degraded slave, and the ele- 
ments wantoned on in undisturbed freedom. 

As we went on, the Yalleys of the James and the Appomat- 
tox, down which our way lay, broadened into an expanse of 
arable acres, and the faces of those streams were frequently 
flecked by gem-Like Uttle islands. 



CnAPTER VII. 

ENTEKmO RICHMOND DISAPPOINTMENT AT ITS APPEARANCE 

EVERYBODY IN UNIFORM CURLED DARLINGS OF THE CAPITAL 

THE REBEL FLAG LIBBY PRISON DICK TURNER SEARCHINO 

THE NEW COMERS. 

Early on the tenth morning after our capture we were told 
that we were about to enter Richmond. Instantly all were 
keenly observant of every detail in the surroundings of a City 
that was then the object of the hopes and fears of thirty-five 
milli ons of people — a City assailing which seventy-five thou- 
sand brave men had already laid down their lives, defending 
which an equal number had died, and w^hich, before it fell, was 
to cost the life blood of another one hundred and fifty thousand 
valiant assailants and defenders. 

So much had been said and written about Richmond that 
our boyish minds had wrought up the most extravagant expect- 
ations of it and its defenses. We anticipated seeing a City dif- 
fering widely from anything ever seen before ; some anomaly 
of nature displayed in its site, itself guarded by imposing and 
impregnable fortifications, with powerful forts and heavy guns, 
perhaps even walls, castles, postern gates, moats and ditches, 
and all the other panoply of defensive warfare, with which 
romantic histor}'- had made us familiar. 

"We were disappointed — badly disappointed — in seeing 
nothing of this as we slowly rolled along. The spires and the 
tall chimneys of the factories rose in the distance very much as 
they had in other Cities we had visited. We passed a single 
line of breastworks of bare yellow sand, but the scrubby pines 



4 STOET OF BEBEL MILITABY PRISONS. 



76 



in front were not cut away, and there were no signs that there 
had ever been any immediate expectation of use for the works. 
A redoubt or two — without guns — could be made out, and 
this was all Grim-visaiced war had few wrinkles on his front 




AN EAST TENNESSEEAN. 



in that neighborhood. They were then seaming his brow on 
the Rappahannock, seventy miles away, where the Army of 
Northern Virginia and the Army of the Potomac lay confront- 
ing each other. 

At one of the stopping places I had been separated from my 
companions by entering a car in which were a number of East 



76 AKDEESONVILLJE. 

Tennesseeans, captured in the operations around Knoxville, and 
whom the Rebels, in accordance with their usual custom, were 
treating with studied contumely. I had always had a very 
warm side for these simple rustics of the mountains and valleys. 
I knew much of their unwavering fidelity to the Union, of the 
firm steadfastness with which the}^ endm^ed persecution for their 
country's sake, and made sacrifices even unto death ; and, as 
in those days I estimated all men simply by their devotion to 
the great cause of National integrity, (a habit that still clings 
to me) I rated these men very highl}'-. I had gone into their 
car to do my little to encourage them, and when I attempted 
to return to my own I was prevented by the guard. 

Crossing the long bridge, our train came to a halt on the 
other side of the river with the usual clamor of bell and whistle, 
the usual seemingly purposeless and vacillating, almost dizzying, 
running backwai'd and for-ward on a network of sidetracks and 
switches, that seemed unavoidably necessar}'-, a dozen'years ago, 
in getting a train into a City. 

Still unable to regain my comrades and share their fortunes, 
I was marched off with the Tennesseeans tlirough the City to 
the office of some one who had charge of the })risoners of war. 

The streets we passed through were lined with retail stores, 
in which business was being carried on very much as in peaceful 
times. Many people were on the streets, but the greater part 
of the men wore some sort of a uniform. Though numbers of 
these Avere in- active ser\dce, yet the wearing of a military garb 
did not necessarily imply this. Nearly e\"ery able-bodied man 
in Eichmond was enrolled in some sort of an organization, and 
armed, and drilled regularly. Even the members of the Con- 
federate Congress were uniformed and attached, in theory at 
least, to the Home Guards. 

It was obvious even to the casual glimpse of a passing prisoner 
of war, that the City did not lack its full share of the class 
which formed so large an element of the society of Washington 
and other Northern Cities during the war — the dainty carpet 
soldiers, heros of the promenade and the boudoir, who strutted 
in uniforms when the enemy was far off, and wore citizen's 
clothes when he was close at hand. There were many curled 
darUngs displaying their fine forms in the nattiest of uniforms, 



A BTOEY OF EEBEL MILITABY PKI80N8. 



77 




A BEBEL DANDY. 



whose gloss had never suffered from so much as a heavy dew, 
let alone a rainy day on the march. The 
Confederate gray could be made into a very 
dressy garb. With the sleeves lavishly em- 
broidered with gold lace, and the collar 
decorated with stars indicating the wearer's 
^ rank — silver for the field oificers, and 
gold for the higher grade, — the feet com- 
pressed into high-heeled, high-instepped 
boots, (no Yirginian is himself without a fine 
pair of skin-tight boots) and the head cov- 
ered with a fine, soft, broad-brimmed hat, 
trimmed with a gold cord, from which a 
bullion tassel dangled several inches down 
the wearer's back, you had a military swell^ 
caparisoned for conquest — among the fair 
sex. 

On our way we passed the noted Capitol of Virginia — a 
handsome marble building, of the column-fronted Grecian tem- 
ple style. It stands in the center of the City. Upon the 
grounds is Crawford's famous equestrian statue of Washington, 
surrounded by smaller statues of other Eevolutionary patriots. 
The Confederate Congress was then in session in the Capitol, 
and also the Legislature of Virginia, a fact indicated by the 
State flag of Virginia floating from the southern end of the 
building, and the new flag of the Confederacy from the northern 
end. This was the first time I 
had seen the latter, which had 
been recently adopted, and I 
examined it with some interest. 
The design was exceedingly 
plain. It was simply a white 
banner, with a red field in the thb kkbii. fla*. 

corner where the blue field with stars is in ours. The two blue 
stripes were drawn diagonally across this field in the shape of a 
letter X, and in these were thirteen white stars, correspond- 
ing to the number of States claimed to be in the Confederacy. 
The above diagram will show the design. 

The battle-flas: was simplv the red field. My examina< 




was simply 



78 ANDEESONVILLE. 

tion of all this was necessarily very brief. The guards felt that 
I was in Richmond for other piu'poses than to study architect- 
ure, statuary and heraldry, and besides they were in a hurry to 
be reUeved of us and get their brealdast, so my art-education 
was abbreviated sharply. 

"We did not excite much attention on the streets. Prisoners 
had by that time become too common in Richmond to create 
any interest. Occasionally passers by would fling opprobrious 
epithets at "the East Tennessee traitors," but that was all. 

The commandant of the prisons directed the Tennesseeans to 
be taken to Castle Lightning — a prison used to confine the 
Rebel deserters, among whom they also classed the East Ten- 
nesseeans, and sometimes the West Yirginians, Kentuclcians, 
Marylanders and Missourians found fighting against them. 
Such of our men as deserted to them were also lodged there, 
as the Rebels, very properly, did not place a high estimate upon 
this class of recruits to their army, and, as we shall see farther 
along, violated all obligations of good faith with them, by put- 
ting them among the regular prisoners of war, so as to exchange 
them for their own men. 

Back we were all marched to a street which ran parallel to 
the river and canal, and but one square away from them. It 
was lined on both sides by plain brick warehouses and tobacco 
factories, four and five stories high, which were now used by 
the Rebel Government as prisons and military storehouses. 

The first we passed was Castle Thunder, of bloody repute. 
This occupied the same place in Confederate history, that the 
dungeons beneath the level of the water did in the annals of 
the Venetian Council of Ten. It was believed that if the bricks 
in its somber, dirt-grimed walls could speak, each could tell a 
separate story of a life deemed dangerous to the State that had 
gone down in night, at the behest of the rutliless Confederate 
authorities. It was confidently asserted that among the com- 
moner occurrences within its confines was the stationing , of a 
doomed prisoner against a certain bit of blood-stained, bullet- 
chipped waU, and feheving the Confederacy of all farther fear 
of bfm by the rifles of a firing party. Uow well this dark rep- 
utation was deserved, no one but those inside the inner circle of 
the Davis Government can say. It is safe to beUeve that more 



A BTOKT OF KEBEL MILITARY PKISOTiS. 79 

tragedies were enacted there than the archives of the Rebel 
civil or mihtary judicature give any account of. The prison 
was employed for the detention of spies, and those chargetl 
with the convenient allegation of " treason against the Confed- 
erate States of America." It is probable that many of these 
were sent out of the world with as little respect for the formal- 
ities of law as was exhibited with regard to the susj>ects during 
the French Revolution. 

Next we came to Castle Lightning, and here I bade adieu to 
my Tennessee companions. 

A few squares more and we arrived at a warehouse larger 
than any of the others. Over the door was a sign : 



Thomas Libby & Son, 

SHIP CHANDLERS AND GROCERS. 



Tliis was the notorious " Libby Prison," whose name was 
painfully familiar to every Union man in the land. Under the 
sign was a broad entrance way, large enough to admit a dray 
or a small wagon. On one side of this was the prison otlice, in 
which were a number of dapper, feeble-faced clerks at ^vork on 
the prison records. 

As I entered this space a squad of newly arrived prisoners 
were being searched for valuables, and having their names, 
ranlf and regiment recorded in the boolvs. Presently a clerk 
addressed as "Majah Tunnah," the man who was superintend- 
ing these operations, and I scanned him with increased interest, 
as I knew then that he was the ill-famed Dick Turner, hated 
all over the North for his brutality to our prisoners. 

Ue looked as if he deserved his reputation. Seen upon the 
street he would be taken for a second or third class gambler, one 
in whom a certain amount of cunning is pieced out by a readi- 
ness to use brute force. Ilis face, clean-shaved, except a 
" Bowery-b'hoy " goatee, was white, fat, and selfishly sensual. 
Small, pig-hke eyes, set close together, glanced around contin- 
ually. His legs were short, his body long, and made to appear 



80 



ANDEKSONVILLE. 



stni longer, by his wearing no vest — a custom common then 
with Southerners. 

His faculties were at that moment absorbed in seeing that no 
person concealed any money from him. His subordinates did 
not search closely enough to suit hmi, and he would run his fat, 
heavily-ringed fingers through the prisoner's hair, feel under their 
arms and elsewhere where he thought a stray fi ve dollar green- 
back might be concealed. But with all his greedy care he was 
no match for Yankee cunning. The prisoners told me after- 
ward that, suspecting they would be searched, they had taken 
off the caps of the large, hollow brass buttons of their coats, 
carefully folded a bill into each cavity, and replaced the cap. 
In this way they brought in several hundred doll-ars safely. 




TUENEK IN QUEST OF BRITISH GOLD. 

There was one dirty old Englisliman in the party, who, Tur- 
ner was convinced, had money concealed aljout his person. He 
compelled him to strip off everything, and stand shivering in 
the sharp cold, while he took up one filthy rag after another, 
felt over each carefully, and scrutinized each seam and fold. I 



A 8TOET OF BEBEL MILITART PRISONS. 81 

was delighted to see that after all his nauseating work he did 
not find so much as a five cent piece. 

It came ray turn, I had no desire, in that frigid atmosphere, 
to strip down to what Artemus Ward called " the skanderlous 
costoom of the Greek Slave," so I pulled out of my pocket my 
little store of wealth — ten dollars in greenbacks, sixty dollars 
in Confederate gray backs — and displayed it as Turner came up 
with, " There's all I have, sir." Turner pocketed it without a 
word, and did not search me. In after months, when I was 
nearly famished, my estimation of " Majah Tunnah " was hardly 
enhanced by the reflection that what would have purchased me 
many good mejils was probably lost by him in betting on a pair 
of queens, when his opponent held a " king full." 

I ventured to step into the office to inquire after my com- 
rades. One of the whey-faced clerks said with the super- 
cihous asperity characteristic of gnat-brained headquarters 
attaches : 

" Get out of here ! " 
as if I had been a stray cur wandering in in search of a bone 
lunch. 

I wanted to feed the fellow to a pile-driver. The utmost I 
could hope for in the way of revenge was that tlie delicate 
creature might some day make a mistake in parting his hair, 
and catch his death of cold. 

The guard conducted us across the sti-eet, and into the third 
story of a building standing on the next corner below. Here 
I found about four hundred men, mostly belonging tx) the Army 
of the Potomac, who crowded around me with the usual ques- 
tions to new prisoners : What was my liegiment, where and 
when captured, and 

What were the j^rospects of exchange? 

It makes me shudder now to recall how often, durino- the 

dreadful months that followed, this momentous question was 

eagerl}^ propounded to every new comer: put with bated 

breath by men to whom exchange meant all tliat they asked of 

this world, and possibly of the next ; meant life, home, wife or 

sweet-heart, friends, restoration to manhood, and self-respect — 

everything, everything that makes existence in this world worth 

havinfj. 

6 



89 . andp:ksonvillk. 

I answered as simply and discouragingly as did the tens of 
thousands that came after me : 

" I did not hear anything about exchange." 

A soldier in the field had many other things of more imme- 
diate interest to thinli about than the exchange of prisoners. 
The question only became a living issue when he or some of his 
intimate friends fell into the enemy's hands. 

Thus began my first day in prison. 



CHAPTER yilL 

INTRODUCTION TO PRISON LIFE THE PEitBERTON^ EUILDINO AND ITa 

OCCUPAKT8 NEAT SAILORS ROLL GALL RATIONS AND CLOTH- 
ING CHIVALRIC "CONFISCATION." 

I began acquainting myself with my new situation and sur- 
roundings. Tiie building into which I had been conducted was 
an old tobacco factory, called the " Pemberton building," pos- 
sibly from an owner of that name, and standing on the corner 
of what I was told were Fifteenth and Carey streets. In front 
it was four stories high ; behind but three, owing to the rapid 
rise of the hill, against which it was built. 

It fronted towards tlie James liiver and Kanawha Canal, and 
the James Piver — both lying side by side, and only one hun- 
dred yards distaiit, with no intervening buildings. The front 
windows alTorded a fine view. To the right front was Libby, 
with its guards pacing around it on the side^valk, watching the 
fifteen hundred officers confined within its avails. At intervals 
during each day squads of fresh prisoners could be seen entering 
its dark mouth, to be registered and searched, and then marched 
off to the prison assigned them. We could see up the James 
Piver for a mile or so, to where the long bridges crossmg it 
bounded the view. Directly in front, across the river, was a 
flat, sandy plain, said to be General Winfield Scott's farm, 
and now used as a proving ground for the guns cast at the 
Tredegar Iron Works. 

The view down the river was very fine. It extended about 
twelve mdes, to where a gap in the woods seemed to indicate a 
fort, which we imagined to be Fort Darling, at that time the 
principal fortification defending the passage of the James, 



84 



AiTDEKSONTILLE. 



Between that point and where we were lay the river, in a long, 
broad mirror-like expanse, like a prett}'' little inland lake. Occa- 
sionally a busy little tug would bustle up or doAvn, a gunboat move 
along with noiseless dignity, suggestive of a reserved power, oi 
a schooner beat lazily from one side to the other. l)at 
these were so few as to make even more pronounced the cus- 
tomary idleness that hung over the scene. The tug's activity 
seemed spasmodic and fjrced — a sort of protest against the 
gradually increasing lethargy that reigned upon the bosom of 
the waters — the gunboat floated along as if performing a per- 
functory duty, and the schooners sailed about as if tired of 
remaining in one place. That little stretch of water was all 
that was left for a cruising ground. Bevond Fort Darlino- the 
Union gunboats lay, and the only vessel that passed the barrier 
wiis the occasional flag-of-truce steamer. 

The basement of the building was occupied as a store-house 
for the taxes-in-kind which the Confederate Government col- 
lected. On the first floor Avere about five hundred men. On 
the second floor — where I was — were about four hundred men. 
These were principally from the First Division, First Corps — 
distinguished by a round red patch on their caps ; First Di\ision, 
Second Corps, marked by a red clover leiif ; and the First Divi- 




ittf^SF- 







BAKNACLE-BACKS DISCOITRAGING A VISIT FKOM A SOLDTEB. 



sion. Third Corps, who wore a red diamond. They were mainly 
captured at Gettysburg and Mine Run. Besides these there was a 



A 8TOKT OF EEBEL MIIITAEY PlilSONS. 85 

C50iisiderable number from the Eighth. Corps, captm-ed at Win- 
chester, and a large infusion of Cavalry — First, Second and Third 
West Virginia — taken in Averill's des})erate raid up the Yir- 
ginia Yalley, with the Wytheville Salt Works as an objective. 

On the third floor "were about two hundred sailors and mar 
rines, taken in the gallant but luckless assault upon the ruins of 
Fort Sumter, in the September previous. They retained the 
discipline of the ship in their quarters, kept themselves trim and 
clean, and their floor as white as a ship's deck. They did not 
court the society of the "sojers" below, whose camp ideas of 
neatness differed from theirs. A few old barnacle-backs always 
sat on guard around the head of the steps leading from the 
lower rooms. They chewed tobacco enormouslj'', and kept their 
mouths filled with the extracted juice. Any lucldess "sojer" 
who attempted to ascend the stairs usually returned in haste, 
to avoid the deluge of the filthy li(]uid. 

For convenience in issuing rations we Avere divided into 
messes of twenty, eacli mess electing a Sergeant as its head, 
and each floor electing a Sergeant-of-the-Floor, who drew 
rations and enforced what little discipline was observed. 

Though we were not so neat as the sailors above us, we tried 
to keep our quarters reasonably clean, and we washed the floor 
every morning, getting down on our knees and rubbing it clean 
and diy with rags. Each mess detailed a man each day to 
wash up the part of the floor it occupied, and he had to do this 
properly or no ration Avould be given him. While the washing 
up was going on each man stripped himself and made close 
examination of his garments for the body-hce, which otherwise 
would have increased beyond control. Blankets Avere also care- 
fully hunted over for these " small deer." 

About eight o'clock a spruce little lisping Rebel named Eoss 
would appear with a book, and a body-guard, consisting of a big 
Irishman, who had the air of a Policeman, and carried a musket 
barrel made into a cane. Behind him were two or tliree armed 
guards. The Sergeant-of-the-Floor commanded : 

" Fall in in four ranlvs for roll-call." 

We formed along one side of the room ; the guards halted at 
the head of the stairs ; Ross walked doAvn in front and counted 
the files, closely foUoAved by his Irish aid, with his gun-barrel 



86 



AJNDERSONVILLE. 



cane raised ready for use upon any one wlio should arouse his 
ruffianly ire. Breaking ranks we retui'ned to our places, and 
sat around in moody silence for three hours. We had eaten 




K088 CAJOLING TIIK ROLL. 

nothing since the previous noon. Rising hungry, our hunger 
seemed to increase in arithmetical ratio with every quarter of 
an hour. 

These times afforded an illustration of the thorough sul)jection 
of man to the t3'^rant Stomach. A more irritable lot of i n<l i viduals 
could scarcel}'^ be found outside of a menagerie than iherse men 
during: the houi-s waiting for rations. " Grosser than two sticks " 
utterly failed as a comparison. They were crosser than the 
lines of a check apron. Many could have given odds to the 
traditional bea,r with a sore head, and run out of the game fifty 
points ahead of him. It was astonishinglj? easy to get up a 
fight at these times. There was no need of going a step out of 
the way to search for it, as one could have a full fledged 



▲ BTOET OF EEBEL MTLITAET PEISONS. 87 

article of overwhelming size on his hands at any instant, by 
a trifling indiscretion of speech or manner. AU the old irri- 
tating flings between the cavalry, the artillery and the infantry, 
the older " first-call " men, and the later or " Three-IIundred- 
Dollar-men," as they were derisively dubbed, between the 
different corps of the Army of the Potomac, between men of 
different States, and lastly between the adherents and oppo- 
nents of McClellan, came to the lips and were answered by 
a blow with the fist, when a ring would be formed around 
the combatants by a crowd, which would encourage them with 
yells to do their best. In a few minutes one of the parties to 
the fistic debate, who found the point raised by him not well 
taken, would retire to the sink to wash the blood from his bat- 
tered face, and the rest would resume their seats and glower at 
space until some fresh excitement roused them. For the last 
hour or so of these long waits hardly a word would be spoken. 
We were too ill-natured to talk for amusement, and there was 
nothing else to talk for. 

This speU was broken about eleven o'clock by the appearance 
at the head of the stairway of the Irishman with the gun-barrel 
cane, and his singing out : 

" Sargint uv the flure : fourtane min and a bread-box I " 

Instantly every man sprang to his feet, and pressed forward 
to be one of the favored fourteen One did not get any more 
rations or obtain them any sooner by this, but it was a rehef , and 
a change to walk the half square outside the prison to the cook- 
house, and help carry the rations back. 

For a little while after our arrival in Eichmond, the rations 
were tolerably good. There had been so much said about the 
privations of the prisoners that our Government had, after 
much quibbling and negotiation, succeeded in getting the priv- 
ilege of sending food and clothing through the fines to us. Of 
course but a smaU part of that sent ever reached its destination. 
There were too many greedy Rebels along its line of passage to 
let much of it be received by those for whom it was intended. 
We could see from our ^vindows Rebels strutting about in over- 
coats, in which the box wrinkles were still plainly visible, wear- 
ing new "U. S." blankets as cloaks, and walking in Govern- 
ment shoes, worth fabulous prices in Confederate money. 



58 AJTOERSONTILLK. 

Fortunately for our Government the Rebels decided to cut 
themselves off from this profitable source of supply. We reaxi 
one day in the Richmond papers that " President Davis and his 
Cabinet had come to the conclusion that it was incompatible 
with the dignity of a sovereign power to permit another power 
with which it was at war, to feed and clothe prisoners in its 
hands." 

I will not stop to argue this point of honor, and sliow its ab- 
surdity by pointing out that it is not an unusual practice with 
nations at war. It is a sullicient commentary upon this 
assum])tion of punctiliousness that the ])apcr went on to say 
that some five tons of clotliing and fifteen tons of food, which 
had been sent under a ilag of truce to City Point, would neither 
be returned nor delivered to us, but "converted to the use of 
the Confederate Government." 

" And Burely they are aii honorable meat" 

Heaven save the mark. 



CHAPTER IX. 

BEANS OR PEAS INSTTFFICIENCY OF DAKKT TESTEStO^rY A GUARD 

KILLS A PRISONER PRISONERS TEAZE THE GUAIiDS DESPERATB 

OUTBREAX. 

But, to return to the rations — a topic which, with escape or 
exchange, were to be the absorbing ones for us for the next fif- 
teen months. There was now issued to every two men a loaf 
of coarse bread — made of a mixture of flour and meal — and 
about the size and shape of an ordinary brick. This half loaf 
was accompanied, wliile our Government was allowed to fur- 
nish rations, with a small piece of corned beef. Occasionally 
we got a sweet potato, or a half-pint or such a matter of soup 
made from a coarse, but nutritious, bean or pea, called variously 
" nigger-pea," " stock-pea," or " cow-pea." 

This, by the way, became a fruitful bone of contention durin c* 
our stay in the South. One strong ]mrty among us maintained 
that it was a bean, because it was shaped like one, and brown, 
which they claimed no pea ever was. The other party held 
that it was a pea because its various names all agreed in describ- 
ing it as a pea, and because it was so full of bugs — none beino' 
entirely free from insects, and some having as many as twelve 
— by actual count — within its shell. This, they declared, was 
a distinctive characteristic of the pea family. The contention 
began with our first instalment of the leguminous ration, and 
was still raging between the survivors who passed into our lines 
in 1865. It waxed hot occasionally, and each side continually 
sought evidence to support its view of the case. Once an old 
darky, sent into the prison on some errand, was summoned to 
decide a hot dispute that was raging in the crowd to which I 



90 ANDEESONVILLE. 

belonged. The champion of the pea side said, producing one 
of the objects of dispute : 

" Now, boys, keep still, till I put the question fairly. Now, 
uncle, what do they call that there?" 

The colored gentleman scrii tinized the vegetable closely, and 
replied, 

" Well, dey raos' generally calls 'em stock-peas, round liyar 
awaj^s." 

" There," said the pea-champion triumphantly. 

" But," broke in the leader of the bean party, " Uncle, don't 
they also call them beans ? " 

" Well, yes, chile, I spec dat lots of 'em does." 

And this was about the way the matter usually ended. 

I will not attempt to bias the reader's judgment by sajdng 
which side I believed to be right. As the historic British show- 
man said, in reply to the question as to whether an animal in 
his collection was a rhinoceros or an elephant, " You pays your 
money and you takes your choice." 

The rations issued to us, as will be seen above, though they 
appear scanty, were still sufficient to support life and health, 
and months afterward, in Andersonville, we used to look back 
to them as sumptuous. "We usually had them divided and eaten 
by noon, and, with the gn a wings of hunger appeased, we spent 
the afternoon and evening comfortably. 'We told stories, paced 
up and down the floor for exercise, played cards, sung, read 
what few books were available, stood at the wmdows and 
studied the landscape, and watched the Rebels trying their guns 
and shells, and so on as long as it was daylight. Occasionally 
it was dangerous to be about the windows. This depended 
wholly on the temper of the guards. One day a member 
of a Virginia regiment, on guard on the * pavement in front, 
deliberately left his beat, walked out into the center of the 
street, aimed his gun at a member of the Ninth West Virginia, 
who was standing at a window near, and firing, shot him 
through the heart, the bullet passing through his body, and 
through the floor above. The act was pm'ely malicious, and 
was done, doubtless, in revenge for some injury which our men 
had done the assassm or his family. 

We were not altogether blameless, by any means. There 



A 8T0RY OF KEBEL MILITAKT PRISONS. 



91 



were few opportunities to say bitterly offensive things to the 
guards let pass unimproved. 

The prisoners in the third floor of the Smith building, 
adjoining us, had their own way of teasing them. Late at 
night, when everybody would be lying down, and out of the 
way of shots, a window in the tlm-d story would open, a broom 




AN evening's amusement with the guards. 



stick, with a piece nailed across to represent arms, and clothed 
with a cap and blouse, would be protruded, and a voice coming 
from a man carefully protected by the wall, would inquire : 

" S-a-y, g-ua-r-d, what time is it ? " 

If the guard was of the long suffering kind he would answer : 

" Take yo' head back in, up dali ; 3^ou laio hits agin all odahs 
to do dat ? " 

Then the voice would say, aggravatingly, " Oh, well, go to 
, you Rebel , if you can't answer a civil ques- 
tion." 

Before the speech was ended the guard's rifle would be at his 



92 



ANDEKSONVILLE. 



shoulder and he would fire. Back would come the blouse and 
hat in haste, only to go out again the next instant, with a deri- 



sive laugh, and 



" Thought you were going to hurt somebody, didn't you, you 
But, Lord, you can't shoot for sour 



apples; if I couldn't shoot no better than you, Mr, Johnny 
Keb, I would " 

By this time the guard, having his gun loaded again, would 
cut short the remarks with another shot, whicli, followed up 
with similar remarks, would provoke still another, when an 
alarm sounding, the guards at Libby and all the other buildings 
around us would turn out. An oliicer of the guard would go 
up with a squad into the third floor, only to find everybody up 
there snoring away as if they were the Seven Sleepei's. After 
relieving his mind of a quantit}^ of vigorous })rofanity, and 
threats to "buck and gag" and cut off the rations of the whole 
room, the officer would return to his quarters in the guard 
house, but before he was fairly ensconced there the cap and 
blouse would go out again, and the maddened guard be regaled 
with a spirited and vividl}'- profane lecture on the depravity 
of Eebels in general, and his own unworthiness in par- 
ticular. 

One night in January things took a more serious turn. The 
boys on the lower floor of our building had long considered a 
plan of escape. There were then about fifteen thousand pris- 
oners in Richmond — ten thousand on Belle Isle and five thou- 
sand in the buildings. Of these one thousand five hundred 
were officers in Libby. Besides there were the prisoners in 
Castles Thunder and Lightning. The essential features of the 
plan were that at a preconcerted signal we at the second and 
third floors should appear at the windows with bricks and irons 
from the tobacco presses, which we should shower down on 
the guards and drive thein away, while the men of the first 
floor would pour out, chase the guards into the guard house in 
the basement, seize their arms, drive those away from around 
Libby and the other prisons, release the officers, organize into 
regiments and brigades, seize the armory, set fire to the pubho 
buildings and retreat from the City, by the south side of the 
James, where there was but a scanty force of liebels, and more 



A BTOKY OF EEBEL MILITAEY PRISONS. 98 

oould be prevented from coming over by burning the bridges 
behind us. 

It was a magniiicent sclieme, and niiglit have been carried 
out, but there was no one in the building who was generally 
believed to have the quahties of a leader. 

Eut while it was being debated a few of the hot heads on 
the lower Hoor undertook to precipitate the crisis. They seized 
what they thought was a favorable oppoitunity, overpowered 
the guard who sLood at the foot of the stairs, and poured into 
the street. The other guards fell back and oi)ened lire on them ; 
other troops hastened up, and soon drove them buck into the 
building, after killing ten or fifteen. We of the second and 
third iioors did not anticipate the break at that time, and were 
taken as much by suj-prise as were the liebeis. Kearly all were 
lying down and many were asleep. iSome hastened to the 
windows, and dropped missiles out, but before any concerted 
action could be taken it was seen that the case was hojjeless, 
and we remained quiet. 

Among those who led in the assault was a drummer-boy of 
some iS'ew York Kegiment, a recldessly brave little niscal. lie 
had somehow smuggled a small four-shooter in with him, and 
as they rushed out he iired it olf at the guards. 

After the prisoners were driven back, the Iiebel ollicei's came 
in and vapored around considerably, but confined themselves to 
big words. They were particularly anxious to lind the revolver, 
and ordered a general and rigorous search for it. The prison- 
ers were all ranged on one side of the room and carefully 
examined by one party, while another hunted thi'OLigii the 
blankets and bundles. It was all in vain ; no pistol could be 
found. The boy had a loaf of wheat bread, bought from a 
baker during the day. It was a round loaf, set together in two 
pieces like a biscuit. lie pulled these apart, laid the four- 
shooter between them, pressed the two halves together, and 
went on calmly nibbUng away at the loaf while the seai^ch was 
progressing. 

Two gimboats were brought up the next morning, and 
Einchored in the canal near us, with their heavy guns trained 
upon the building. It was thought that this would intimidate 
us from a repetition of the attack, but our sailors conceived 



94 A2fDEKSONVILLE. 

that, as they laid against the shore next to us, they could be 
easily captured, and their artillery made to assist us. A scheme 
to accomphsh this was being wrought out, when we received 
notice to move, and it came to naught 



CHAPTER X. 

THE EXCHANGE AND THE CAUSE OF ITS mTERRUPTION BRIEF 

RESUME OF THE DIFFERENT CAIiTELS, AND THE DIFFICULTIES THAT 
LED TO THEIR SUSPENSION, * 

Few questions intimately connected with the ax3tual opera- 
tions of the Rebellion have been enveloped with such a mass of 
conflicting statement as the responsibihty for the interruption 
of the exchange. Southern writers and politicians, naturally 
anxious to diminish as much as ]iossible the great odium resting 
upon their section for tlie treatment of prisoners of war during 
the last year and a half of the Confederacy's existence, have 
vehemently charged that the Government of the United States 
deliberately and pitilessly resigned to their fate such of its sol- 
diers as foil into the hands of the enemy, and repelled all 
advances from the Rebel Government looking toward a resump- 
tion of exchange. It is alleged on our side, on the other hand, 
that our Government did all that was possible, consistent with 
National dignity and military prudence, to secure a release of 
its unfortunate men in the power of the Rebels. 

Over this vexed question there has been waged an acrimoni- 
ous war of words, which has apparently led to no decision, nor 
any convictions — the disputants, one and all, remaining on the 
sides of the controversy occupied by them when the debate 
hegim. 

I may not be in possession of all the facts bearing upon the 
case, and may be warped in judgment by prejudices in favor of 
my o\vn Government's wisdom and humanity, but, however 
^his may be, the following is my firm belief as to the controUiiig 
facts in this lamentable affair ; 



96 AinDEESONVILLE. 

1. For some time after the beginning of hostilities oiir Gov- 
emment refused to exchange prisoners with the Rebels, on the 
ground that this might be hehl by the European powers who 
were seeking a pretext for acknowledging the Confederacy, to 
be admission by us that the war was no longer an insurrection 
but a revolution, which had resulted in the 6?^ facto establish- 
ment of a new nation. This difficulty was finally gotten over 
by recognizing the Rebels as belligerents, which, while it placed 
them on a somewhat different plane from mere insurgents, did 
not elevate them to the position of soldiers of a foreign power. 

2. Then the following cartel was agreed upon by Generals 
Dix on our side and Hill on that of the Rebels : 

IIaxall's Landing, on James IIiver, July 22, 1863. 
The undersigned, having been commissioned by the authorities Ihcy respect- 
ively represent to make arrangements for a general exchange of prisoners of 
war, have agreed to the following articles ; 

Article I. — It is hereby agreed and stipulated, that all prisoners of war, 
held by either party, including those taken on private armed vessels, known 
as privateers, shall be exchanged upon the conditions and terms following: 

Prisoners to be exchanged man for man and officer for officer. Privateers 
to be placed upon the footing of officers and men of the navy. 

Men and officers of lower grades may be exchanged for officers of a higher 
grade, and men and officers of different services may be exchanged according 
to the following scale of equivalents: 

A General-commanding-in-chief, or an Admiral, shall be exchanged for 
officers of equal rank, or for sixty privates or common seamen. 

A Commodore, carrying a broad pennant, or a Brigadier General, shall be 
exchanged for officers of equal rank, or twenty privates or commou seamen. 

A Captain in the Navy, or a Colonel, shall be exchanged for officers of equal 
rank, or for fifteen privates or common seamen. 

A Lieutenant Colonel, or Commander in the Navy, shall be exchanged for 
officers of equal rank, or for ten privates or common seamen. 

A Lieutenant, or a Master in the Navy, or a Captain in the Army or marines 
shall be exchanged for officers of equal rank, or six privates or common 
seamen. 

Master's-mates in the Navy, or Lieutenants or Ensigns in the Army, shall be 
exchanged lax officers of equal rank, or four privates or common seamen. 
Midsliipmcn, warrant officers in the Navy, masters of merchant vessels and 
commanders of privateers, shall be exchanged for othcers of equal rank, or 
three privates or common seamen; Second Captains, Lieutenants or mates of 
merchant vessels or privateers, and all petty officers in the Navy, and all non- 
commissioned officers in the Army or marines, shall be se\'erally exchanged 
for persons of equal rank, or for two privates or common seamen ; and private 
soldiers or common seamen shall be exchantjed for each other man for man. 



A 8T0RT OF REBEL MILITAIIT PRISONS. 97 

Articlh II. — Local, State, civil and militia rank held by persons not in 
actual military service will not be recognized; the basis of exchange being 
the grade actually held in the naval and military service of the respective 
parties. 

Article III. — If citizens held by either party on charges of disloyalty, or 
any alleged civil offense, are exchanged, it shall only be for citizens. Cap- 
tured sutlers, teamsters, and all civilians in the actual service of either party, 
to be exchanged for persons in similar positions. 

AitTicLE IV. — All prisoners of war to be discharged on parole in ten days 
after their capture; and the prisoners now held, and those hereafter taken, to 
be transported to the points mutually agreed upon, at the expense of the cap- 
turing party. The surplus prisoners not exchanged shall not be permitted to 
take up arms again, nor to serve as military police or constabulary force in 
any fort, garrison or lield-work, held by either of the respective parties, nor 
as guards of prisoners, deposits or stores, nor to discharge any duty usually 
performed by soldiers, until exchanged under the provisions of this cartel. 
The exchange is not to be considered complete until tiie officer or soldier ex- 
changed for has been actually restored to the lines to which he belongs. 

Article V. — Each party upon the discharge of prisoners of the other 
party is authorized to discharge an equal number of their own officers or men 
from parole, furnishing, at the same time, to the other party a list of their 
prisoners discharged, and of their own officers and men relieved from parole; 
thus enabling each party to relieve from parole such of their ollicers and men 
as the party may choose. The lists thus muluully furnished, \\ ill keep both 
parties advised of the true condition of the exchange of piisonuis. 

Article VI. — The stipulations and provisions above mentioned to be of 
binding obligation during the continuance of the war, it matters not which 
party may have the surplus of prisoners; the great principles involved being, 
First, An equitable exchange of prisoners, man for man, or officer fur officer, 
or officers of higlier grade exchanged for officers of lower grade, or for pri- 
vates, according to scale of equivalents. Second, That privates and officers 
and men of different services may be exchanged according to the same scale of 
equivalents. Third, That all prisoners, of whatever arm of service, are to 
be exchanged or paroled in ten days from the time of their capture, if it be 
practicable to transfer them to their own lines in that time; if not, so soon 
thereafter as practicable. Fourth, That no officer, or soldier, employed in 
the service of either party, is to be considered as exchanged and absolved 
from his parole until his equivalent has actually readied the lines of his 
friends. Fifth, That parole forbids the performance of field, garrison, police, 
or guard or constabulary duty. 

John A. Dix, Major Qeneral. 

D. H. Hill, Major Gtneral, C. S. A. 

BtJPPLKMENTARY ARTICLES. 

Article VII. — All prisoners of war now held on either side, rnd all pris- 
oners hereafter taken, shall be sent with all reasonable dispatch to A. M. 
Aiken's, below Dutch Gap, on the James River, in Virginia, or to Vicksburg, 
7 



98 ANDEKSONVILLB. 

on the Mississippi River, in the State of Slississippi, and there exchanged ot 
paroled until such exchange can be effected, notice being previously given by 
each party of the number of prisoners it will send, and the time when they will 
be delivered at those points respectively; and in case the vicissitudes of war 
shall change the military relations of the places designated in this article to 
the contending parties, so as to render the same incouvenieut for the delivery 
and exchange of prisoners, other places bearing as nearly as may be the pres- 
ent local relations of said places to the lines of said parties, shall be, by mu- 
tual agreement, substituted. But nothing in this article contained shall pre- 
vent the commanders of the two opposing armies from exchanging prisoners 
or releasing them on parole, at other points mutually agreed on by said com- 
manders. 

Article VIII. — For the purpose of carrying into effect the foregoing arti- 
cles of agreement, each party will appoint two agents for the exchange of 
prisoners of war, whose duty it shall be to communicaie with each other by 
correspondence and otherwise; to prepare the lists of prisoners; to attend to 
the delivery of the prisoners at the places agreed on, and to carry out promptly, 
effectually, and in good faith, all the details and provisions of the said articles 
of agreement. 

Article IX. — And, in case any misunderstanding shall arise In regard ta 
any clause or stipulation in the foregoing articles, it is mutually agreed that 
such misunderstanding shall not affect the release of prisoners on parole, as 
herein provided, but shall be made the subject of friendly explanation, in . 
order that the object of this agreement may neither be defeated nor postponed. 

John a. Dix, Major General. 

D. II. Hill, iJuJor General. C. S. A. 

This plan did not work well. Men on botli .sides, who 
wanted a httle rest from soldiering, could obtain it by stiag- 
gling in the vicinit}^ of the enemy. Their parole — following 
close upon their capture, frequently u})on the spot — allowed 
them to visit home, and sojourn awhile wliere were pleasanter 
pastures than at the front. Then the liebels grew into the 
habit of paroling everybody that they could constrain into 
being a prisoner of war. Peaceable, un^varlike and decrepit 
citizens of Kentucky, East Tennessee, West Vh-ginia, Missouri 
and Maryland were '' captured " and paroled, and set off against 
regular liebel soldiers taken by us. 

3. After some months of trial of this scheme, a modification 
of the cartel ^vas agreed upon, the main feature of which was 
that all prisoners must be reduced to possession, and deUvered 
to the exchange officers either at City Point, Ya., or Yicksburg, 
Miss. This worked very well for some months, until our Gov- 
ernment began organizing negro troops. The Kebels then 



A BTOKY OF REBEL MLLITAKY PKISUNQ. 99 

issued an order that neither tlieso troops nor their officers 
should be held as amenable to the laws of war, but that, when 
captured, the men should be returned to slavery, and the offi- 
cers turned over to the Governors of the States in which they 
were taken, to be dealt with according to the stringent lawp 
punishing the incitement of servile insurrection. Our Govern- 
ment could not permit this for a day. It was bound by every 
consideration of National honor to protect tJiose who wore its 
uniform and bore its flag. The Eebel Government was 
promptly informed that Rebel officers and men would be held 
as hostages for the proper treatment of such members of colored 
regiments as might be taken. 

4. This discussion did not put a stop to the exchange, but 
while it was going on Yiclcsburg was captured, and the battle 
of Gettysburg was fought. The first placed one of the exchange 
points in our hands. At the opening of tlie light at Gettys- 
burg Lee captured some six thousand Pennsylvania militia. 
no sent to Meade to have these exchanged on the field of bat- 
tle. Meade declined to do so for two reasons : first, because it 
was against tlie cartel, which prescribed that prisoners nnist bo 
reduced to possession ; and second, because he was anxious to 
have Lee hampered with such a body of prisoners, since it was 
very doubtful if he could get his beaten array back across the 
Potomac, let alone his prisoners. Lee then sent a communica- 
tion to General Couch, commanding the Pennsylvania militia, 
asking him to receive prisoners on ])arole, and Couch, not k now in,"- 
what Meade had done, acceded to the request. Our Govern- 
ment disavowed Couch's action instantly, and ordered the 
paroles to be treated as of no force, whereupon the Pel^el Govern- 
ment ordered back into the field twelve thousand of the pris- 
oners captured by Grant's army at Yicksburg. 

5. The paroling now stopped abruptly, leaving in the hands 
of both sides the prisoners captured at Gettysbui^g, except the 
militia above mentioned. The Eebels added- considerably to 
those in their hands by their captures at Chickamauga, while 
we gained a great many at Mission Ridge, Cumberland Gap 
and elsewhere, so that at the time we arrived in Richmond the 
Rebels had about fifteen thousand prisoners in their hands and 
our Government had about twenty-five thousand. 



100 AA'DEKSONVILLE. 

6. The T^ebels now began demanding that the prisoners on 
both sides be exchanged — man for man — as far as they went, 
and the remainder paroled. Our Government offered to ex- 
change man for man, but declined — on account of the previous 
bad faith of the Eebels — to release the balance on parole. The 
Rebels also refused to make any concessions in regard to the 
treatment of officers and men of colored regiments. 

7. At this juncture General B. F. Butler was appointed to 
the command of the Department of the Blackwater, which 
made him an ex-officio Commissioner of Exchange. The Bebels 
instantl}^ refused to treat with him, on the ground that he was 
outlawed by the proclamation of Jefferson Davis. General 
Butler very pertinently replied that this only placed him nearer 
their level, as Jefferson Davis and all associated with him in 
the Rebel Government had been outlawed by the proclamation 
of President Lincoln. The Rebels scorned to notice this home 
thrust by the Union General. 

8. On February 12, 18G4, General Butler addressed a letter 
to the Rebel Commissioner Ould, in which he asked, for the 
sake of humanity, that the questions interrupting the exchange 
be left temporarily in abeyance while an informal exchange was 
put in operation. He would send five hundred prisoners to City 
Point ; let them be met by a similar number of Union prison- 
ers. This could go on from day to day until all in each other's 
hands should be transferred to their respective flags. 

The five hundred sent with the General's letter were received, 
and five hundred Union prisoners returned for them. Another 
five hundred, sent the next day, were refused, and so this reason- 
able and humane proposition ended in nothing. 

This was the condition of affairs in February, 1864, when the 
Rebel authorities concluded to send us to Andersonville. If 
the reader will fix these facts in his mind, I will explain other 
phages as they develop. 



CHAPTER XL 

PUTTESTG IN THE TIME EATIONS COOKING UTENSILS " FIAT " 

SOUP " SPOONING " AI^KICAN NEWSl'APER VENDERS TRADING 

GREENBACKS FOR CONFEDERATE MONET VISIT FROM JOHN 

MORGAN. 

The "Winter days passed on, one by one, aiter the manner 
described in a former chapter, — the mornings in ill-natured 
hunfrer ; the afternoons and evening's in tolerable comfort. The 
rations kei)t growing lighter and lighter ; the quantity of bread 
remained the same, but the meat diminished, and occasionally 
days would pass Avithout any being issued. Then we received 
a pint or less of soup made from the beans or peas before men- 
tioned, but this, too, suffered continued change, in the grad- 
ually increasing proportion of James Eiver water, and decreas- 
ing of that of the beans. 

The water of the James River is doubtless excellent : it looks 
well — at a distance — and is said to serve the purposes of ablu- 
tion and navigation admirably. There seems to be a Hmit, 
however, to the extent of its advantageous combination with 
the bean (or pea) for nutritive purposes. This, though, was our 
view^ of the case, merely, and not shared in to any appreciable 
extent by the gentlemen who were managing our boarding 
house. We seemed to view the matter through allopathic spec- 
tacles, they through homoeopathic lenses. We thought that 
the atomic weight of peas (or beans) and the James Eiver fluid 
were about equal, which would indicate that the proper com- 
bining proportions would be, say a bucket of beans (t)r peas) to 
a bucket of water. They held that the nutritive potency was 
increased by the dilution, and the best results were obtainable 



102 



AKDERSONVLLLK 



when the symptoms of hunger were combated by the tritura- 
tion of a bucketful of the peas-beans -with a barrel of cupMi 
'iamesiana. 

My first experience with this "liat" soup was very instruct- 
ive, if not agreeable. I had come into ])rison, as did most other 
pi'isoners, absolutely destitute of dishes, or cooking utensils. 
The well-used, half -canteen frying-pan, the blackened quart cup, 
and the spoon, which formed the usual kitchen outfit of the 
cavalryman in the field, were in the haversack on my saddle, 
and were lost to me when I separated from my horse. Now, 
when we were told that- we were to draw soup, I was in great 
danger of losing my ration from having no vessel in which to 
receive it. There were but few tin cups in the ]irison, and 

these were, of course, 
wanted by tiieir owners. 
r>y great good fortune I 
found an empty fruit 
can, holding about a 
cjuart. ] was also lucky 
enough to lind a piece 
of wire f j-oui which to 
make a bail. 1 next 
- manufactui'ed a spoon 
and kni fe com 1 )i ned from 

PBISON^Re' CXJLIKART OUTFIT. ^ bit Of liO(>lV!rOn. 

These two humble utensils at once ]^laced myself and my im- 
mediate chums on another plane, as fur as worlilly goods were 
concerned. We were better off than the mass, and as well off 
as the most fortunate. It was a curious illusti-ation of that 
law of political economy which teaches that so-called intrinsic 
value is largely adventitious. Their possession gave us infinitely 
more consideration among our fellows than would the j)Osscssion 
of a brown-stone front in an eligible locati<m, fufnisl)e<l with 
hot and cold water tlirougliout, and all the mudei-n im])rove- 
ments. It was a place where cooking utensils were in demand, 
and title-deeds to brown-stone fronts were not. AVe were in 
possession of something which every one needed every day, 
and, therefore, were persons of consequence and consideration 
to those around us who were present or prospective borrowers. 




A BTOKY OF REBEL MILITARY PRISONS. 



103 



On our side vre obeyed another law of political economy: We 
clung to our property \vitli unrelaxing tenacity, made the best 
use of it in our intercourse with our fellows, and only gave it 
up after our release and entry into a land where the plenitude 
of cooking utensils of superior construction made ours value- 
less. Then we Hung them into the sea, with little gratitude for 
tlie gi'eat benefit they had been to us. We were more anxious to 
get rid of the many hateful recollections clustering around them. 
But, to return to the alleged soup : As I started to drink 
my first ration it seemed to me that there was a superfluity 

of bugs upon its surface. Much 
as I wanted animal food, I did 
not care for fresh meat in that 
form. I skimmed them off care- 
fully, so as to lose as little soup 
as possible. But the top layer 
seemed to be underlaid with an- 
other equally dense. This was 
also sldmmed olf as deftly as 
possible. But beneath this ap- 
peared another layer, which, 
when removed, showed still an- 
other; and so on, until I had 
scraped to the bottom of 'the 
and the h\st of the bugs went with the last of my 
1 have before spoken of the remarkable bug fecundity 
This was a demonstration of it. Every 




KKIMMINlj THE BUGS FROM MY SOUP. 



can, 

soup. 

of the beans (or peas). 

scouped out pea (or bean) which found its way into the soup 

bore inside of its shell from ten to twenty of these hard-crusted 

little weevil. Afterward I drank my soup without skimming. 

1 1 \vas not that I hated the weevil less, but that I loved the soup 

more. It was only another step toward a closer conformity to 

tliat grand rule which I have made the guiding maxim of my life : 

U7/efi Irmist, I had better. 

I recommend this to other young men starting on their career. 

The room in which Ave were was barely large enough for all 
of us to he down at once. Even then it required pretty close 
" spooning" together — so close in fact that all sleeping along 
one side would have to turn at once. It was funny to watch 



104 ANDEKSONVILLE. 

this operation. All, for instance, Arould be l}ing on their right 
sides. They would begin to get tired, and one of the wearied 
ones would sing out to the Sergeant who was in command of 
the row — 

" Sergeant : let's spoon the other way." 

That individual would reply : 

" All right. AUentio7i / Left SPOOX ! ! and the whole line 
would at once flop over on tlieir left sides. 

. _ ri|Jjl,,,:.i|i|l|i'!:|, 



,t-i-T,> 



.^ 



SPOONING. 



The feet of the row that slejit along the east wall on the floor 
below us were in a line with the edge of the outer dOor, and a 
chalk line drawn from the crack between the door and the 
frame to the opposite wall would -touch, say 150 pairs of feet. 
They were a noisy crowd down there, and one night their noise 
so provoked the guard in front of the door that he called out 
to them to keep quiet or he would fire in upon them. They 
greeted this threat with a chorus profanely uncomphmentary to 
the purity of the guard's ancestr}^ ; they did not imply his 
descent a la Dar^vin, from the remote monke}^ but more imme- 
diate generation by a common domestic animal. The incensed 
Kebel o])oned the door wide enougli to thrust his gun in, and he 
jOred directly down the hue of toes. His piece was apparently 
loaded \vith buckshot, and the little balls must have struck the 
legs, nipped off tlie toes, pierced the feet, and otherwise slightly 
wounded the lower extremities of fifty men. The simultaneous 
shriek that went up was deafening. It was soon found out that 



A STORY OF KEBEL MILITARY PRISONS. 



105 



nobody had been hurt seriously, and there was not a little fun 
over the occurrence. 

One of the prisoners in Libby was Brigadier General Neal Dow, 
of Maine, ^vll0 had then a National reputation as a Temperance 
advocate, and the author of the famous Maine Liquor Law. 
We, whose places were near the front window, used to see him 
frequently on the street, accompanied by a guard. He was 
allowed, we understood, to visit our sick in the hospital. His 
long, snowy beard and hair gave him a venerable and com- 
manding appearance. 

NcAvsboys seemed to be a thing unkno^wn in Eichmond. The 
papers were sold on the streets by negro men. The one who- 
frequented our section with the morning journals had a mellow, 
rich baritone for which we would be glad to exchange the shrill 
cries of our st] eeb Arabs. We long remembered him as one of 
the peculiar features of Eichmond. He had one unvarying for- 
mula for ])roclaiming his wares. It ran in this wise: 
" Great Xooze in de^apahs! 

" Great Xooze from Orange Coaht House, Vijvjinnyl 
" Great Nooze from Alexandry, Virginny ! 
" Great Nooze from "Washington City ! 
" Great Nooze from Chattanoogy, Tennes5<?(? .' 
" Great Nooze from Chahlston, Sou' CahZma / 
" Great Nooze in de j^apahs ! " 

It did not matter to him that the Eebela 
had not been at some of these places for 
months. He would not change for such 
mere trifles as the entire evaporation of aU 
possible interest connected with Chattar 
nooga and Alexandria. He was a true- 
Com-bon Southerner — he learned nothing 
and forgot nothing. 

There was a considerable trade driven 

between the prisoners and the guard at the 

door. This was a very lucrative position 

for the latter, and men of a commercial 

A KicHJHOND NEWS BoT. tum of mlud generally managed to get 

stationed there. The blockade had cut off the Confederacy's- 

supplies from the outer world, and the many trinkets about a 




106 



ANDERSONVILLE. 



man's person were in good demand at high prices. The men of 
the Army of the Potomac, who were paid regularly, and were 
always near their supplies, had their pockets tilled ^Nith combs, 
silk handkerchiefs, knives, neckties, gold pens, pencils, silver 
watches, phiA'ing cards, dice, etc. tSuch of these as escaped 
-appropriation by their captors and Dick Turner, were eagerly 



NjU|IJ|I||i|I|k.i''Iiu|.'(!Vj1i 1,^(1 

i>liillillii.\iilkl',yiii;,Ji;=^a 



lips^ 




"sat, guard: do tou want to but some greenbacks?" 

bought by the guards, who paid fair prices in Confederate 
money, or traded wheat bread, tobacco, daily papers, etc., for 
them. 

There was also considerable brokerage in money, and the 
manner of doing this was an admirable exemplification of the 
folly of the " fiat " money idea. The Rebels exhausted their 
ingenuity in framing laws to sustain the purchasing power of 
their paper money. It was made legal tender for all debts 
public and private ; it was decreed that the man who refused to 
take it was a public enemy ; all the considerations of patriotism 
were rallied to its support, and the law provided that any 



A STORY OF KEBEL MILITAKY PRISONS. 107 

citizens found trafficking in the money of the enemy — i. «., 
greenbacks, should suffer imprisonment in the Penitentiary, and 
any soldier so offending should suffer death. 

jSTotwithstanding all this, in Richmond, the head and heart 
■of the Confederacy, in January, 1864 — long before the Rebel 
cause began to look at all desperate — it took a dollar to buy 
such a loaf of bread as now^ sells for ten cents ; a newspaper was 
a half dollar, and everything else in proportion. And still 
Avoree : There was not a day during our stay in Richmond but 
what one could go to the hole in the door before which the 
guard was pacing and call out in a loud whisper : 

" Say, Guard : do you want to buy some greenbacks ? " 

And be sure that the reply would be, after a furtive glance 
around to see that no officer was watching : 

" Yes ; how much do you want for them ? " 

The reply was then : " Ten for one." 

" All right ; how much have you got ? " 

The Yankee would reply; the Rebel would walk to the 
farther end of his beat, count out the necessary amount, and, 
returning, put up one hand with it, while with the other he 
caught hold of one end of the Yankee's greenback. At the word, 
both would release their holds simultaneously, the exchange 
was complete, and the Rebel would pace industriously up and 
down his beat with the air of the school boy who " ain't been a- 
doin' nothing." 

There was never any risk in approaching any guard with a 
proposition of this land. I never heard of one refusing to trade 
for greenbacks, and if the men on guard could not be restrained 
by these stringent laws, what hope could there be of restraining 
anybody else ? 

One day we were favored with a visit from the redoubtable 
General John H. Morgan, next to J. E. B. Stuart the greatest 
of Rebel cavalry leaders. lie had lately escaped from the Ohio 
Penitentiary. lie was invited to Richmond to be made a Major 
General, and was given a grand ovation by the citizens and civic 
Government. lie came into our building to visit a number of 
the First Kentucky Cavalry ( loyal ) — captured at ISTew Phila- 
delphia, East Tennessee — whom he was anxious to have 
exchanged for men of his own regiment — the First Kentucky 



108 AlfDERSONVILLE. 

Cavalry ( Rebel ) — who were captured at the same time he was. 
I happened to get very close to him while he was standing 
there talking to his old acquaintances, and I made a mental 
photograph of him, which still retains all its original distinct- 
ness. He was a tall, heavy man, with a full, coarse, and some- 
what dull face, and lazy, sluggish gray eyes. Ilis long black 
hair was carefully oiled, and turned under at the ends, as was 
the custom with the rural beaux some years ago. Ilis face was 
clean shaved, except a large, sandy goatee. He wore a high 
silk hat, a black broadcloth coat, Kentucky jeans pantaloons, 
neatly fitting boots, and no vest. There was nothing remotely 
suggestive of unusual ability or force of character, and I thought 
as I studied him that the sting of George D. Prentice's Ion mot 
about him was in its acrid truth. Said Mr. Prentice : 

" Why don't somebody put a pistol to Basil Duke's head, and 
blow John Morgan's brains out?" [Basil Duke was John 
Morgan's right hand man.] 



CHAPTEK Xn. 

REMARKS A8 TO NOMEXCI-ATURE VAOCTNATION ANT> TT8 EFFECTS 

" n'yAARKEr's," THEUi OUAKACIKKISXIUS, A^D THEIR METHODS 

OF OPERATING. 

Before going any further in this narrative it may be "well to 
state that the nomenclature employed is not used in any odious 
or disparaging sense. It is simply the adoption of the usual 
terms employed by the soldiers of both sides in spealdng to or 
of each other. We habitually spoke of them and to them, as 
" Rebels," and " Johnnies ; " they of and to us, as " Yanks," and 
" Yankees." To have said " Confederates," " Southerners," 
" Secessionists," or " Federalists," " Unionists," " Northerners " 
or " Nationalists," would have seemed useless euphemism. The 
plainer terms suited better, and it was a day when things were 
more important than names. 

For some inscrutable reason the Rebels decided to vaccinate 
us all. "Why they did this has been one of the unsolved prob- 
lems of my life. It is true that there was small pox in the City, 
and among the prisoners at DanviUe ; but that any consider- 
ation for our safety should have led them to order general 
inoculation is not among the reasonable inferences. But, be 
that as it may, vaccination was ordered, and performed. By 
great good luck I was absent from the bm'lding with the squad 
drawing rations, when our room was inoculated, so I escaped 
what was an infliction to all, and fatal to many. The direst 
consequences followed the operation. Foul ulcers appealed on 
various parts of the bodies of the vaccinated. In many 
instances the arms literally rotted off ; and death followed from 
a corruption of the blood. Frequently tbe faces, and other 



110 ANDEJBSOiJVILLE. 

parts of those who recovered, were disfigured by the ghastly 
cicatrices of healed ulcers. A special friend of mine, Sergeant 
Frank Beverstock — then a member of the Third Virginia Cav- 
alry, (loyal), and after the war a banker in Bowling Green, O., 
— bore upon his temple to his dying day, (which occurred a 
year ago), a fearful scar, where the flesh had sloughed off from 
the effects of the virus that had tainted his blood. 

This I do not pretend to account for. AVe thought at the 
time that the Rebels had deliberately poisoned the vaccine 
matter with sy[iliilitic virus, and it was so charged upon them. 
I do not now believe tliat this was so ; I can hardly think that 
members of the humane profession of medicine would be guilty 
of such subtle diabolism — worse even than poisoning the wells 
from which an enemy must drii^. The explanation with 
which I have satisfied myself is that some careless or stupid 
practitioner took the vaccinating lym]>h from diseased human 
bodies, and thus infected all with the blood venom, without any 
conception of what he was doing. The low standard of med- 
ical education in the South makes this theory quite plausible. 

We now formed the acquaintance of a species of human 
vermin that united with the Bebels, cold, hunger, lice and the 
oppression of distraint, to leave nothing undone that could add^ 
to the miseries of our prison life. 

These were the fledglings of the slums and dives of New 
York — graduates of that metropolitan sink of iniquity where 
the rogues and criminals of the whole world meet for mutual 
instruction in ^^ce. 

They were men Avho, as a rule, had never known a day of 
honesty and cleanliness in their misspent hves ; ^vhose fathers, 
brothers and constant companions were roughs, malefactors and 
felons ; whose mothers, wives and sisters were prostitutes, pro- 
curesses and thieves ; men who had from infancy lived in an 
atmosphere of sin, until it saturated every fiber of their being 
as a dweller in a jungle imbibes malaria by every one of his 
millions of pores, until his very marrow is surcharged with it. 

They included representatives from aU nationalities, and their 
descendants, but the Enghsh and Irish elements predominated. 
They had an argot pecuhar to themselves. It was partly 
made up of the "flash" language of the London thieves,, 



A 8T0KY OF REBEL MILITARY PRISONS. 



Ill 




A "h'taarkeb." 



amplified and enriched by the cant vocabulary and the 

jargon of crime of every Euro- 
pean tongue. They spoke it with 
a peculiar accent and intonation 
that made them instantly recogni- 
zable from the roughs of all other 
Cities. They called themselves 
« N ' Yaarkers ; " we came to know 
them as " Eaiders." 

If everything in the animal 
world has its counterpart among 
men, then these were the wolves, 
jackals and hyenas of the race — 
at once cowardly and fierce, — 
audaciously bold when the power 
of numbers was on their side, and 
cowardly when confronted with 
resolution by anytliing like an 
equality of strength. 
Like all other roughs and rascals of whatever degree, they 
were utterly worthless as soldiers. There may have been in 
the Army some habitual corner loafer, some fistic champion of 
the bar-room and brothel, some Terror of Plug Uglyville, who 
was worth the salt in the hard tack he consumed, but if there 
were, I did not form his acquaintance, and I never heard of any 
one else who did. It was the rule that the man who was the 
readiest in the use of fist and slungshot at home had the 
greatest diffidence about forming a close acquaintance with cold 
lead in the neighborhood of the front. Thousands of the so- 
called "dangerous classes" were recruited, from whom the 
Government did not receive so much service as would pay for 
the buttons on their uniforms. People expected that they 
would make themselves as troublesome to the Pebels as they 
were to good citizens and the Pohce, but they were only pug- 
nacious to the provost guard, and terrible to the people in the 
rear of the Army w^ho had anything that could be stolen. 

The highest type of soldier which the world has yet produced 
is the intelligent, self-respecting American boy, with home, and 
father and mother and friends behind him, and duty in front 



112 ANDEESONVILLE. 

beckoning him on. In the sixty centuries that war has been a 
profession no man has entered its ranks so calmly resolute in 
confronting danger, so shrewd and energetic in his aggressive- 
ness, so tenacious of the defense and the assault, so certain to 
rise swiftly to the level of every emergency, as the boy who, 
in the good old phrase, had been " weU-raised " in a God-fearing 
home, and went to the field in obedience to a conviction of 
duty. His unfading courage and good sense won fights that 
the incompetency or cankering jealousy of commanders had 
lost. High officers were occasionally disloyal, or willing to 
sacrifice their country to personal pique ; stdl more frequently 
they were ignorant and inefficient ; but the enlisted man had 
more than enough innate soldiership to make amends for these 
<Ieficiencics, and his superb conduct often brought honors and 
promotions to those only who deserved siiame and disaster. 

Our " N'Yaarkers," swift to see any opportunity for dishonest 
gain, had taken to bounty-jumping, or, as they termed it, 
" leppin' the bounty," for a livehhood. Those who were thrust 
in upon us had followed this until it had become dangerous, 
and then deserted to the Rebels. The latter kept them at 
Castle Lightning for awhile, and then, rightly estimating their 
character, and considering that it was best to trade them off for 
a genuine Rebel soldier, sent them in among us, to be exchanged 
regularly with us. There was not so much good faith as good 
policy shown by this. It was a matter of indifference to the 
Rebels how soon our Government shot these deserters after 
getting them in its hands again. They were only anxious to 
use them to get their own men back. 

The moment they came into contact with us our troubles 
began. They stole whenever opportunities offered, and they 
were indefatigable in making these offer ; they robbed by actual 
force, whenever force would avail ; and more obsequious lick- 
spittles to power never existed — the}^ were perpetually on the 
look-out for a chance to curry favor by betraying some plan or 
scheme to those who guarded us. 

I saw one day a queer illustration of the audacious side of 
these fellows' characters, and it shows at the same time how 
brazen effrontery will sometimes get the better of courage. In 
a room in an adjacent building were a number of these fellows, 



A STOBY OF KEBEIi MILITAIIY PRISONS. 113 

and a still greater number of East Tennesseeans. These latter 
were simple, ignorant folks, but reasonably courageous. About 
fifty of them were sitting in a group in one corner of tlie room, 
and near them a couple or three "N'Yaarlvers." Suddenly one 
of the latter said with an oath : 

" , I was robbed last night ; I lost two silver watches, a 

couple of rings, and about fifty dollars in greenbaclvs, I believe 
some of you fellers went through me." 

This was all ])ure invention ; he no more had the things men- 
tioned than he had purity of heart and a Christian spirit, but 
the unsophisticated Tennesseeans did not dream of disputing 
his statement, and answered in chorus : 

" Oh, no, mister ; we didn't take your things ; we ain't that 
kind." 

This was like the reply of the lamb to the ^volf, m the fable, 
and the N'Yaarlcer retorted with a siinulated storm of passion, 
and a torrent of oaths : 

" , I know ye did ; I know some uv \cz has got them ; 

stand up agin the wall there till I search yez ! " 

And that whole fifty men, any one of whom was physically 
equal to the N'Yaarker, and his superior m point of real courage, 
actually stood against the wall, and submitted to being searched 
and having taken from them the few Confederate bills they had, 
and such trinkets as the searcher took a fancy to. 

I was thoroughly disgusted. 



CHAPTEK XIIL 

BELLE ISLE TERRIBLE SUFFERING FROM COLD AND HUNGER — FATB 

OF LIEUTENANT BOISSEUx's DOG OUR COMTANT MYSTERY TER- 
MINATION OF ALL nOPES OF ITS SOLUTION. 

In February my cliuni — B. B. Andrews, no^Y a physician in 
Astoria, Illinois — was brought into our building, greatly to my 
delight and astonishment, and from him I obtamed the much- 
desired news as to the fate of my comrades. He told me they 
had been sent to ]3elle Isle, whither he had gone, but succumb- 
ing to the rigors of that dreadful place, he had been taken to 
the hospital, and, upon his convalcsence, placed in our prison. 

Our men were suifcring terribly on the island. It was low, 
dam}>, and swept b}-- the bleak, piercing winds that howled up 
and down the surface of tlie James. The first prisoners placed 
on the island had been given tents that afforded them some 
shelter, but these were all occupied Avhen our battahon came in, 
so that they were compelled to lie on the snow and frozen 
ground, without shelter, covering of any kind, or fire. Dm-ing 
this time the cold had been so intense that the James had 
fivjzen over three times. 

The rations had been much ^vorse than ours. The so-called 
soup had been diluted to a ridiculous thinness, and meat had 
wholly disappeared. So intense became the craving for animal 
food, that one day when Lieutenant Boisseux — the Commandant 
— strolled into the camp with his beloved white bull-terrier, 
which was as fat as a Cheshire pig, the latter was decoyed into 
a tent, a blanket thrown over him, his throat cut within a rod of 
where his master was standing, and he was then skinned, cut up,, 
cooked, and furnished a savory meal to many hungry men. 



A 8T0KT OF KEBEL MILITAIiY PKISONS. 



115 



"WTien Boisseirs learned of the fate of his four-footed friend he 
was, of course, intensely enraged, but that was all the good it did 
him. The only revenge possible was to sentence more prisoners 
to ride the cruel wooden horse which he used as a means of 
punishment. 

Four of our company were ah'cad}'- dead. Jacob Lo^vry and 
John Beach were standing near the gate one day when some one 
snatched the guard's blanket from the post \vliere he had hung 
it, and ran. The enraged sentry leveled his gun and fired into 
the CDOwd. The balls passed through Lowry's and Beach's 
breasts. Then Charley Osgood, son of our Lieutenant, a quiet, 




DECOYING BOISSEUX S POG TO ITS DEATH. 



fair-haired, pleasant-spoken boy, but as brave and earnest as 
his gallant father, sank under the combination of hunger and 
cold. One stinging morning he was found stiff and stark, on 
the hard ground, his bright, frank blue eyes glazed over in 
death. 

One of the mysteries of our company was a tall, slender, 
elderly Scotchman, who appeared on the rolls as William Brad- 
ford. "What his past Ufe had been, where he had lived, what 
his profession, whether married or single, no one ever knew. 
He came to us while in Camp of Instruction near Springfield, 
Illinois, and seemed to have left aU his past behind him as he 
crossed the hne of sentries around the camp. He never received 
any letters, and never wrote an}'- ; never asked for a furlough 



IK) AXDERSONVLLLE. 

or pass, and never expressed a ayIsIi to be elsewhere than in 
camp, lie was courteous and pleasant, but very reserved. lie 
interfered with no one, obeyed orders promptly and without 
remark, and was always present for duty. Scrupulously neat 
in dress, always as clean-shaved as an old-fashioned gentleman 
of the world, with, manners and conversation that shoAved him 
to have belonged to a refined and polished circle, he was evi- 
dently out of place as a private soldier in a company of reckless 
and none-too-refined young Illinois troopers, but he never 
availed himself of any of the numerous opportunities offtred to 
change his associations. Ilis elegant penmansliip "would have 
secured him an easy berth and better society at headquarters, 
but he declined to accept a detail. lie became an exciting mys- 
tery to a knot of us imaginative young cubs, who sorted up out 
of the reminiscential rag-bag of high colors and strong con- 
trasts with which the sensational literature that we most 
ali'ected had plentifully stored our minds, a half-dozen intensely 
emotional careers for him. We spent much time in mentally 
trying these on, and discussing which fitted him best. We 
were always expecting a denouement that would come like a 
lightning flash and reveal bis whole mysterious past, showing 
him to have been the disinherited scion of some noble house, a 
man of high station, who w^as expiating some fearful crime ; an 
accomplished villain eluding his pursuers — in short, a Somebody 
who would be a fitting hero for Miss Brad don's or Wilkie Col- 
lins's literar}^ purposes. We never got but two clues of his past, 
and they were faint ones. One day he left lying near me a 
small copy of " Paradise Lost," that he always carried with 
him. Turning over its leaves I found all of Milton's bitter 
invectives against w^omen heavily underscored. Another time, 
while on guard with him, he spent much of his time in wT:'iting 
some Latin verses in very elegant chirography upon the white 
painted boards of a fence along which his beat ran. We 
pressed in all the available knowledge of Latin about camp, 
and found that the tenor of the verses was very uncompliment- 
ary to that charming sex which does us the honor of being our 
mothers and sweethearts. These evidences we accepted as suf- 
ficient demonstration that there was a woman at the bottom of 
the mystery, and ma le us more impatient for further develop- 



A STOUT OF KEISEL MLLITAET PRISONS. 



117 



ments. These were never to come. Bradford pined away on 
Bello Isle, and grew weaker, but no less reserved, each day. 
At length, one bitter cold night ended it all. He was found 
in the morning stone dead, with his iron-gray hair frozen fast to 
the ground, upon Avhich he lay. Our mystery had to remain 
unsolved. There was nothing about his person to give any 
hint as to liis ijust. 




THE DEAD SCOTCHMAN. 



CHAPTEE Xiy. 

HOPENO FOR EXCnANGE AN EXPOSITION OF THE DOOnilNE OF 

CHANCES — OFF FOR ANDERSONYILLE UNCERTAINTY AS TO OUB 

DESTINATION ARRIVAL AT ANDERSONYILLE. 

As each lagging day closed, Ave confidently expected that the 
next would bring some news of the eagerly-desired exchange. 
We hoi)efully assm^ed each other that the thing could not be 
delayed much longer; that th^ Spring was near, the campaign 
would soon open, and each government would make an effort 
to get all its men ijito the held, and this would bring about a 
transfer of prisoners. A Sergeant of the Seventh Indiana 
Infantry stated his theory to me this w^ay : 

" You know I'm just old lightnin' on chuck-a-luck. Now the 
way I bet is this : I lay down, say on the ace, an' it don't 
come up ; I just double my bet on the ace, an' keep on doublin' 
every time it loses, until at last it comes up an' then I win a 
bushel o' money, and mebbe bust the bank. You see the 
thing's got to come up some time; an' every time it don't come 
up makes it more likely to come up the next time. It's just 
the same way with this 'ere exchange. The thing's got to hap- 
pen some day, an' every day that it don't ha}-)})en increases the 
chances that it will happen the next da3\" 

Some months later I folded the sanguine Sergeant's stiffening 
hands together across his fleshless ribs, and helped carry his 
body out to the dead-house at Andersonville, in order to get a 
piece of wood to coolc my ration of meal with. 

On the evening of the 17th of February, 1SG4, we were 
ordered to get ready to move at daybreak the next morning. 
We were certain this could mean nothing else than exchange, 
and our exaltation was such that wo did little sleeping that 



A 8TOBT OF KEBEL MTLITABT PKIS0N8. 119 

night. The morning was very cold, but we sang and joked aa 
we marched over the crealdng bridge, on om* way to the cars. 
We were packed so tightly in these that it was impossible to 
even sit down, and we rolled slowly away after a wheezing 
engine to Petersburg, whence we expected to march to the 
exchange post. We reached Petersburg before noon, and the 
cars halted there a long time, we momentarily expecting an 
order to get out. Then the train started up and moved out of 
the City toward the southeast. This was inexplicable, but 
after we had proceeded this way for several hours some one 
conceived the idea that the Rebels, to avoid treating with But- 
ler, were taking us into the Department of some other com- 
mander to exchange us. This explanation satisfied us, and our 
spirits rose again. 

Night found us at Gaston, N. C, where we received a few 
crackers for rations, and changed cars. It was dark, and we 
resorted to a little strategy to secure more room. About thirty 
of us got into a tight box car, and immediately announced that 
it was too full to admit any more. When an officer came along 
with another squad to stow away, we would yell out to him to 
take some of the men out, as we were crowded unbearably. In 
the mean time everybody in the car would pack closely around 
the door, so as to give the impression that the car was densely 
crowded. The Ilebel would look convinced, and demand — 

" Why, how many men have 3^ou got in de cah ? " 

Then one of us would order the imaginary host in the invis- 
ible recesses to — 

" Stand still there, and be counted," while he would gravely 
count up to one hundred or one hundred and twenty, which 
was the utmost hmit of the car, and the Rebel would hurry off 
to ]iut his })risoners somewhere else. We managed to play this 
successfully during the whole jom^ney, and not only obtained 
room to lie down in the car, but also drew three or four times 
as many rations as were intended for us, so that while we at no 
time had enough, we were farther from starvation than our less 
strategic companions. 

The second afternoon we arrived at Raleigh, the capitol of 
North Carolina, and were camped in a piece of timber, and 
shortly after dark orders were issued to us aU to lie flat on the 



120 ANDEKSONVLLLE. 

ground and not rise up till daylight. About the midcUo of the 
night a man belonging to a isew Jersey regiment, who had 
apparently forgotten the order, stood up, and was immediately 
shot dead by the guard. 

For four or live days more the decrepit little locomotive 
strained along, dragging after it the rattling old cars. The 
scenery was intensely monotonous. It was a flat, almost 
unending, stretch of pine barrens and the land so poor that a dis- 
gusted Illinoisan, used to the fertility of the great Americas 
Bottom, said rather strongly, that, 

" By George, they'd have to manure this ground before they 
could even make brick out of it." 

It was a surprise to all of us who had heard so much of the 
w^ealth of Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Geor- 
gia, to fmd the sod a sterile sand bank, interspersed with 
swamps. 

We had still no idea of where we were going. We only 
knew that our general course was southward, and that we hati 
passed through the Carolinas, and were in Georgia. ^Ve fur- 
bished up our school knowledge of geography and endeavored 
to recall something of the location of Ealeigh, Charlotte, 
Columbia and Augusta, through whicii we passed, but the- 
attempt was not a success. 

Late on the afternoon of the 25th of February tJie Seventh 
Indiana Sergeant approached me with the inquiry : 

" Do you know Avhere Macon is ? " 

The place had not then become as well known as it was 
afterward. 

It seemed to me that I had read something of Macon in 
Revolutionary history, and that it was a fort on the sea coast. 
lie said that the guard had told him that we were to be taken 
to a point near that place, and we agreed that it was probably 
a new place of exchange. A little later we passed through the 
town of Macon, Ga, and turned upon a road that led almost 
due south. 

About midnight the train stopped, and we were ordered oif. 
We were in the midst of a forest of tall trees that loaded the 
air with the heavy balsamic odor peculiar to pine trees. A few 
smaU rude houses were scattered around near. 



A SH'KY ok KElBJill. MILITARY PKI80N8. 121 

Stretching out into the darkness was a double row of great 
heaps of burning pitch pine, that smoked and flamed fiercely, 
and lit up a little space around in the somber forest with a 
ruddy glare. Between these two rows lay a road, which wo 
were ordered to take. 

The scene was weird and uncanny. I had recently read the 
" Iliad," and tlie long lines of huge fires reminded me of that 
.scene in the first book, where the Greeks burn on the sea shore 
the bodies of those smitten by ApoUo's pestilential arrows : 

For nine long nights, through all the dusky air. 
The pyres, thick flaming, shot a dismal glare. 

Five hundred weary men moved along slowly through 
double Unes of guards. Five hundred men marched silently 
towards the gates that were to shut out life and hope from 
most of them forever. A quarter of a mile from the railroad we 
came to a massive palisade of great squared logs standing 
upright in the ground. The fires blazed up and showed us a 
section of these, and two massive wooden gates, with heavy 
iron hinges and bolts. They swung open as we stood there 
wid we passed through into the space beyond- 

We were in Andersonville, 



CHAPTEE XY. 

GEORmA A LEAN AND HUNGRY LAND DIFFERENCE BETWEKH 

UPPER AND LOWER GEORGIA THE VILLAGE OF ANDKESOK- 

VILLE. 

As the next nine months of the existence of those of us who 
survived were spent in intimate connection with the soil of 
Georgia, and, as it exercised a potential influence upon our 
comfort and well-being, or rather lack of these — a mention of 
some of its peculiar characteristics may help the reader to a 
fuller comprehension of the conditions surroundmg us — our 
environment, as Darwin would say. 

Georgia, which, next to Texas, is the largest State in the 
South, and has nearly twenty-five per cent, more area than the 
great State of Kew York, is divided into two distinct and 
widely differing sections, by a geological line extending directly 
across the State from Augusta, on the Savannah River, tlirough 
Macon, on the Ocmulgee, to Columbus, on the Chattahoochie. 
That pai't lying to the north and west of this line is usually 
spoken of as " Upper Georgia ; " whUe that lying to the south 
and east, extending to the Atlantic Ocean and the Florida lino, 
is called "Lower Georgia." In this part of the State — though 
far removed from each other — were the prisons of Anderson- 
'V'ille, Savannah, MUlen and Blackshear, in which we were incar- 
cerated one after the other. 

Upper Georgia — the capital of which is Atlanta — is a fruit- 
ful, productive, metalliferous region, that will in time become 
quite wealthy. Lower Georgia, which has an extent about 
equal to that of Indiana, is not only poorer now than a worn- 






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▲ BTOET OF REBEL MHJTAEY PKI60NS. 1^ 

out province of Asia Minor, but in all probability mil over 
remain so. 

It is a starved, sterile land, impressing one as a desert in the 
(i rst stages of reclamation into productive soil, or a productive 
soil in the last steps of deterioration into a desert. It is a 
vast expanse of arid, yellow sand, broken at intervals by foul 
swamps, with a jungle-liko growth of unwholesome vegetation, 
and teeming with venomous snakes, and all manner of hideous 
crawling things. 

The original forest stiU stands almost unbroken on this wide 
stretch of thirty thousand Square miles, but it does not cover it 
as we say of forests in more favored lands. The tall, solemn 
pines, upright and sjnnmetrical as huge masts, and wholly des- 
titute of limbs, except the little, umbrella-like crest at the very 
top, stand far apart from each other in an unfriendly isolation. 
There is no fraternal interlacing of branches to form a kindly, 
umbrageous shadow. Between them is no genial undergrowth 
of vines, shrubs, and demi-trees, generous in fruits, berries and 
nuts, such as make one of the charms of Northern forests. On 
the ground is no rich, springing sod of emerald green, fragrant 
with the elusive sweetness of white clover, and dainty flowers, 
but a sparse, wiiy, famished grass, scattered thinly over the 
surface in tufts and patches, like the hair on a mangy cur. 

The giant pines seem to have sucked up into their immense 
boles all the nutriment in the earth, and starved out every 
minor growth. So wide and clean is the space between them, 
that one can look through the forest in any direction for miles, 
with almost as little interference with the view as on a prairie. 
In the sw^ampier parts the trees are low^er, and their limbs are 
hung with heavy festoons of the gloomy Spanish moss, or 
" death moss," as it is more frequently called, Ijecause where it 
grows rankest the malaria is the deadliest. Everj^where Xature 
seems sad, subdued and somber. 

I have long entertained a, peculiar theory to account for the 
decadence and ruin of countries. My reading of the world's 
history seems to teach me that when a strong people take pos- 
session of a fertile land, they reduce it to cultivation, thrive 
upon its bountifulness, multiply into millions the mouths to be 
fed from it, tax it to the last limit of production of the neces- 



126 AITDEESONVILLE. 

saries of life, take from, it continually, and give nothing backy 
starve and overwork it as cruel, grasping men do a servant or a^ 
beast, and when at last it breaks down under the strain, it 
revenges itself by starving many of them with great famines, 
while the others go off in search of new countries to put 
through the same process of exhaustion. We have seen one coun_ 
try after another undergo this process as the seat of empire took 
its westward way, from the cradle of the race on the banks of 
the Oxus to the fertile plains in the Yalley of the Euphrates, 
Impoverishing these, men next sought the Yalley of the Nile, 
then the Grecian Peninsula; next Syracuse and the Italian 
Peninsula, then the Iberian Peninsula, and the African shores- 
of the Mediterranean. Exhausting all these, they were deserted 
for the French, German and English portions of Europe. The 
turn of the latter is now come ; famines are becoming terribly 
frequent, and manldnd is pouring into the virgin fields of 
America. 

Lower Georgia, the Carolinas and Eastern Virginia have all 
the characteristics of these starved and worn-out lands. It 
would seem as if, away back in the distance of ages, some 
numerous and civilized race had drained from the soil the last 
atom of food-producing constituents, and that it is now slowly 
gathering back, as the centuries pass, the elements that have- 
been wrung from the land. 

Lower Georgia is very thinly settled. Much of the land is. 
still in the hands of the Government. The three or four rail- 
roads which pass through it have little reference to local trailio. 
There are no towns along them as a rule ; stations are made 
every ten miles, and not named, but numbered, as " Station 
No. 4" — "No. 10," etc. The roads were built as through 
lines, to bring to the seaboard the rich products of the interior. 

Andersonville is one of the few stations dignified with a 
lame, probably because it contained some half dozen of shabby 
houses, whereas at the others there was usually nothing more 
than a mere open shed, to shelter goods and travelers. It is on 
a rudely constructed, rickety railroad, that runs from Macon 
to Albany, the head of navigation on the Flint River, which is 
one hundred and six miles from ]\Iacon, and two hundi-ed and 
fiity from the Gulf of Mexico. AndersonviUe is about sixty 



A BTOBT OF EKBEL MILITARY PRISONS. 127" 

miles from Macon, and, consequently, about three hundred 
miles from the Gulf. The camp was merely a hole cut in the 
wilderness. It was as remote a point from our armies, as they 
then lay, as the Southern Confederacy could give. The near- 
est was Sherman, at Chattanooga, four hundred miles away, 
and on the other side of a range of mountains hundreds of milei 
wide. 

To us it seem^ed beyond the last forlorn limits of civilization.. 
"We felt that we were more completely at the mercy of our foes 
than ever. While in Richmond we were in the heart of the 
Confederacy ; we were in the midst of the Rebel military and 
civil force, and were surrounded on every hand by visible evi- 
dences of the great magnitude of that power, but this, while it. 
enforced our ready submission, did not overawe us depressingly, . 
We knew that though the Rebels were all about us in great . 
force, our own men were also near, and in still greater force — 
that while they were very strong our army was still stronger,, 
and there was no telling what day this superiority of strength 
might be demonstrated in such a way as to decisively benefit us. 

But here we felt as did the Ancient Mariner : 

Alone on a wide, wide Bca, 

So lonely 'twas that God himself 

8carc« feeiaed there to be. 



CHAPTEE XVI 

WAKING UP IN ANBERSONVILLE — SOME DESCRIPTION OF THE PLACE 
OCR FIRST MAIL BmLDING SHELTER GEN. WINDER HIM- 
SELF AND LINEAGE. 

We roused, up promptly witli the dawn to take a survey of 
•our new abiding place. We found ourselves in an immense 
pen, about one thousand feet long by eight hundred wide, as a 
young surveyor — a member of the Thirty-fourth Ohio — in- 
formed us after lie had paced it off. lie estimated that it con- 
tained about sixteen acres. The walls were formed by pine 
logs twenty-live feet long, from two to three feet in diameter, 
hewn square, set into the ground to a depth of five feet, and 
placed so close together as to leave no crack through which the 
country outside could be seen. There being five feet of the 
logs in the ground, the wall was, of course, twenty feet high. 
This manner of enclosure was in some respects superior to a 
wall of raasonr}'-. It was equally unscalable, and much more 
diflicult to undermine or batter down. 

The pen was longest due north and south. It was divided 
in the center by a creek about a yard wide and ten inches deep, 
■running from west to east. On each side of this was a quaking 
bog of slimy ooze one hundred and fifty feet wide, and so yield- 
ing that one attempting to walk upon it would sink to the 
waist. From this swamp the sandhills sloped north and south 
to the stockade. All the trees inside the stockade, save two, 
had been cut down and used in its construction. All the rank 
vegetation of the swamp had also been cut off. 

There were two entrances to the stockade, one on each side 
•of the creek, midwiiy between it and the ends, and called re- 



A 8T0ET OF REBEL MILITARY PKIS0N8. 129 

spectively the " North Gat'e " and the " South Gate." These 
were constructed double, by building smaller stockades around 
them on the outside, with another set of gates. When prison- 
ers or wagons with rations were brought in, they were first 
brought inside the outer gates, which were carefully secured, 
before the inner gates were opened. This was done to prevent 
the gates being carried by a rush by those confined inside. 

At regular intervals along the palisades were little perches, 
upon which stood guards, who overlooked the whole inside of 
the prison. 

The only view we had of the outside was that obtained by 
looking from the highest points of the l^orth or South Sides 
across the depression where the stockade crossed the swamp. 
In this way we could see about forty acres at a time of the ad- 
joining woodland, or say one hundred and sixty acres altogeth- 
er, and this meager landscape had to content us for the next 
half year. 

Before our inspection was finished, a wagon drove in with 
rations, and a quart of meal, a sweet potato and a few ounces 
of salt beef were issued to each one of us. 

In a few minutes we were all hard at work preparing our 
first meal in Andersonville. The debris of the forest left a 
temporary abundance of fuel, and we had already a cheerful 
fire blazing for every little squad. There were a number of 
tobacco presses in the rooms we occupied in Richmond, and to 
each of these was a quantity of sheets of tin, evidentlj'" used to 
put between the layers of tobacco. The deft hands of the 
mechanics among us bent these up into square pans, Avhich 
were real handy cooking utensils, holding about a quart. 
"Water was carried in them from the creek ; the meal mixed in 
them to a dough, or else boiled as mush in the same vessels ; 
the potatoes were boiled ; and their final service was to hold a 
little meal to be carefully bro^^^led, and then water boiled upon 
it, so as to form a feeble imitation of coffee. I found my etlu- 
cation at Jonesville in the art of baking a hoe-cake now came in 
good play, both for myself and companions. Taking one of 
the pieces of tin which had not yet been made into a pan, we 
spread upon it a layer of dough about a half-inch thick. Prop- 
ping this up nearly upright before the lire, it was sooq nicely 




130 ANDEKSONTLLLE. 

browned over. This process made it sweat itself loose fronj' 
the tin, when it was tui-ned over and the bottom browned also. 

Save that it ^vas destitute of salt, it 
was quite a toothsome bit of nutri- 
ment for a hungry man, and 1 
recoininend my readers to try 
making a *' pone " of this kind 
:,^ , once, just to see wliat -it was hke. 

': The supreme indifference with 

''^\ which the Ilebels always treated 

i-- the matter of cookino: utensils for 

_; __^^^. ,,,.._„___, ;/^ us, excited my wonder. It never 

"^''"^'^^^^^^^''*''***^'^^''^=^^^'''' semed to occur to them that we 

OOOKmB RATIONS. ^^^J^^ ^^^^^ ^^^ ^^^^^^ ^^^^j ^^ ^^^^ 

sels for our food than cattle or swine. Never, during my whole 
prison life, did I see so much as a tin cup or a bucket issued to 
a prisoner. Starving men were driven to all sorts of shifts for 
want of these. Pantaloons or coats were pulled off and their 
sleeves or legs' used to draw a mess's meal in. Boots were com- 
mon vessels for carrying water, and when the feet of these gave 
way the legs were ingeniously closed up with pine pegs, so as to 
form rude leathern buckets. Men whose pocket knives had 
escaped the search at the gates made very ingenious little 
tubs and buckets, and these devices enabled us to get along 
after a fashion. 

After our meal was disposed of, we held a council on the- 
situation. Though we had been sadly disappointed in not 
beiuiT exchano-ed, it seemed that on the wliole our condition 
had been bettered. This first ration was a decided imjirove- 
raent on those of the Pemberton building ; we had left the 
snow and ice behind at Richmond — or rather at some place 
between Raleigh, X. C, and Columbia, S. C. — and the air here, 
though chill, was not nipping, but bracing. It looked as if we 
would have a plenty of wood for shelter and fuel ; it was certain!}" 
better to have sixteen acres to roam over than tlie stilling con- 
fines of a building ; and, still better, it seemed as if there would 
be 'plenty of opportunities to get beyond the stoclcade, and 
attempt a journey through the vvoods to that blissful land — - 
"Our hnes." 



A 8T0BT OF BEBEL MILITABY PRISONS. 131 

We settled down to make the best of things. A Eebel Ser- 
geant came in presently and arranged us in hundreds. We 
subdivided these into messes of twenty-five, and began devising 
means for shelter. Nothing showed the inljorn capacity of the 
Northern soldier to take care of himself better than the way 
in which we accomplished this with the rude materials at our 
command. No ax, spade nor mattock was allowed us by the 
Rebels, who treated us in regard to these the same as in respect 
to culinary vessels. The only tools were a few pocketr knives, 
and perhaps half-a-dozen hatchets which some infantrymen — 
principally members of the Third Michigan — were allowed to 
retain. Yet, despite aU these drawbacks, we had quite a village 
of huts erected in a few days, — nearly enough, in fact, to afford 
tolerable shelter for the whole five hundred of us first-comers. 

The withes and poles that grew in the swamp were bent into 
the shape of the semi-circular bows that support the canvas 
covers of army wagons, and both ends thrust in the ground. 
These formed the timbers of our dwellings. They were held 
in place by weaving in, basket-wise, a network of briers and 
vines. Tufts of the long leaves which are the distinguishing 
characteristic of the Georgia pine (popularly known as the 
"long-leaved pine") were wrought into this network until a 
thatch was formed, that was a fair protection against the rain 
— it was like the Irishman's unglazed window-sash, which 
" kep' out the coarsest uv the cold." 

The results acporaplished were as astonishing to us as to the 
Rebels, who would have lain unsheltered upon the sand until 
bleached out like field-rotted flax, before thinking to protect 
themselves in this way. As our village was approaching com- 
pletion, the Rebel Sergeant who called the roll entered. lie 
Tas very odd-looldng. The cervical muscles were distorted in 
such a way as ^ to suggest to us the name of " Wry-necked 
Smith," by which we always designated him. Pete Eates, of 
the Third Michigan, who w^as the wag of our squad, accounted 
for Smith's condition by saying that while on dress parade once 
the Colonel of Smith's regiment had commanded " eyes right," 
and then forgot to give the order " front." Smith, being a 
good soldier, had kept his eyes in the position of gazing at the 
buttons of the third man to the right, waiting for the order to 



182 



AJJDEESONVILLB. 



r^tore them to their natural direction, until they had become 
permanently fixed in their obliquity and he was compelled to 
go through life taking a biased view of all things. 

Smith walked in, made a diagonal survey of the encampment, 
which, if he had ever seen " Mitchell's Geography," probably 
reminded him of the picture of a Kaffir village, in that instruct- 
ive but awfully dull book, and then expressed the opinion that 
usually welled up to every Eebel's lips : 

"Well, I'll be durned, if you Yanks don't just beat the 
devil." 

Of course, we replied with the weU-worn prison joke, that we 
supposed we did, as we beat the Rebels, who were worse than 
the devil. 

There rode in among us, a few days after our arrival, an old 
man whose collar bore the wreathed stars of a Major General. 
Heavy white locks fell from beneath his slouched hat, nearly 
to his shoulders. Sunken gray eyes, too dull and cold to light 
up, marked a hard, stony face, the salient feature of which was 

a thin-lipped, compressed mouth, 
with corners drawn down deeply 
— the mouth which seems the 
world over to be the index of sel- 
fish, cruel, sulky malignance. 
It is such a mouth as has the 
school-boy — the coward of the 
play ground, who delights in 
pulling off the wings of flies. 
It is such a mouth as we can 
imagine some remorseless inquis- 
itor to have had — that is, not an 
inquisitor filled Avith holy zeal 
for what he mistakenly thought 
the cause of Christ demanded, 
but a spleeny, envious, rancorous shaveling, who tortured men 
from hatred of their superiority to him, and sheer love of 
inflicting pain. 

The rider was John H. Winder, Commissary General of 
Prisoners, Baltimorean renegade and the malign genius to 
whose account should be charged the deaths of more gaUant 




•«N. JOnX H. TTINnEB. 



A 8T0BY OF REBEL MILITAItY PRISONS. 133 

men than all the inquisitors of the world ever slew by the less 
dreadful rack and wheel. It was he who in August could point 
to the three thousand and eighty-one new made graves for that 
month, and exultingly tell his hearer that he was " doing' more 
for the Confederacy than twenty regiments." 

His lineage was in accordance with his character. His 
father was that Oeneral William 11. Winder, whose poltroon- 
ery at Bladensburg, in 1814, nulliiied the resistance of the 
gallant Commodore Barney, and gave Washington to the 
British. 

The father was a coward and an incompetent ; the son, 
always cautiously distant from the scene of hostilities, was the 
tormentor of those whom the fortunes of war, and the arms 
of brave men threw into his hands. 

Winder gazed at us stonily for a few minutes without speak- 
mg, and, turning, rode out again. 

Our troubles, from that hour, rapidly increased. 



CHAPTER XYIL 

THE PLAJTTATTON NEGROB NOT STUPID TO BK LOYAL THKTR DITHT' 

EAMBIC MUSIC COPl'KRHKAn OPINION OF LONGFELLOW. 

The stockade was not quite finished at the time of our 
arrival — a gap of several hundred feet appearing at the south- 
west corner. A gang of about two hundred negros were at 
work felling trees, heaving logs, and placing them upright in 
the trenches. 'SVe had an opportunity — soon to disappear for- 
ever — of studying the workings of the "peculiar institution" 
in its very home. The negros were of the lowest field-hand 
class, strong, dull, ox-like, but each having in our eyes an 
admixture of cunning and secretiveness that their masters pre- 
tended was not in them. Their demeanor toward us illustrated 
this. We were tlie objects of the most supreme interest to 
them, but when near us and in the presence of a white Rebel, 
this interest took the shape of stupid, open-eyed, open-mouthed 
wonder, something akin to the look on the face of the rustic 
lout, gazing for the first time upon a locomotive or a steam 
threshing machine. But if chance threw one of them near us when 
he tliought himself unobserved by the Rebels, the blank, vacant 
face lighted up with an entirely different expression. lie was no 
longer the credulous yokel who believed the Yankees were only 
slightly modified devils, ready at any instant to return to their 
original horn-and-tail condition and snatch him away to the 
bluest kind of perdition ; he knew, apparently quite as well as 
his master, that they were in some way his friends and alhes, 
and he lost n(3 opportunity in communicating his appreciation 
of that fact, "and of offering his services in any possible way. 
And these offers were sincere. It is the testimony of every ' 



A B'l'OIiV <)K KKIIKL MIl.nAKV l')il.>').S- 



135 



Union prisoner in the South that he was never betrayed by or 
disappointed in a field negro, but could always approach any 




A FIELD HAITD. 

one of them with perfect confidence in his extending all the aid 
in his power, whether as a guide to escape, as sentinel to signal 
danger, or a purveyor of food. These services were frequently 
attended with the greatest personal risk, but they were none 
the less readily undertaken. This applies only to the field- 
iiands; the house servants were treacherous and wholly un- 
reliable. Yery many of our men who managed to get away 
from the prisons were recaptured through their betrayal by 
house servants, but none were retaken where a field liand could 
iprevent it. 

We were much interested in watching the negro work 
They wove in a great deal of their peculiar, wild, mournful 
music, whenever the character of the labor permitted. They 
seemed to sing the music for the music's sake alone, and were 
as heedless of the fitness of the accompanying words, as the 
composer of a modern opera is of his libretto. One middle- 
aged man, with a powerful, mellow baritone, like the round, 
fall notes of a French horn, played by a virtuoso, was the 



136 ANDERSON VLLLE. 

musical leader of the party. He never seemed to bother him- 
self about air, notes or words, but improvised all as he went 
along, and he sang as the spirit moved him. He would sud- 
denly break out with — 

" Oh, he's gone np dah, nevah to come back agin," 

At this every darkey within hearing would roll out, in 
admirable consonance with tfie pitch, air and time started by 
the leader — 

" O-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-oo-o! " 

Then would ring out from the leader as from the throbbing 
lips of a silver trumpet — 

" Lord bress him bouI; I done hope he ia hajipy now 1 " 

And the antiphonal two hundred would chant back — 

" O-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o! " 

And so on for hours. They never seemed to weary of 
singing, and we certainly did not of listening to them. The 
absolute independence of the conventionalities of tune and 
sentiment, gave them freedom to wander through a kaleideo- 
scopic variety of harmonic effects, as spontaneous and change- 
ful as the song of a bird. 

I sat one evening, long after the shadows of night had 
fallen upon the hillside, with one of my chums — a Frank 
Berkstresser, of the Ninth Maryland Infantry, who before enlist- 
ing was a mathematical tutor in college at Hancock, Maryland. 
As we listened to the unwearying flow of melody from the 
camp of the laborers, I thought of and repeated to him Long- 
fellow's fine lines : — 

THE SLAVE SINGING AT MIDNIGHT. 

« « « * * 

And the voice of his devotion 
ruled my soul with strong emotion | 
For its tones by turns were glad 
Sweetly solemn, wildly gad. 

Panl and Silas, in their prison. 
Sang of Christ, the Lord arisen, 
And an earthquake's arm of might 
Broke their dungeon gates at night. 

But, alas, what holy angel 
Brings the slave this glad evangel 
And what earthquake's arm of might, 
Breaks his prison gatos at night. 



A STORY OF REBEL, MILITAKV PRISONS. 137 

Said I : " jS'ow, isn't that fine, Berkstresser ? " 
He was a Democrat, of fearfully pro-slavery ideas, and he 
replied, sententiously : 
" O, the poetry's tolerable, but the sentiment's damnable." 



CHAPTER XYIIL 

SCHEMES AlTD PLANS TO ESCAPE — SCALING THE STOCKADE — 
ESTABLISHING THE DEAD LINE THE FIRST MAN KILLED. 

The ofTicial designation of our prison was " Camp Sump- 
ter,'- but this was scarcely known outside of the Rebel documents, 
reports and orders. It was the same way with the 
prison live miles from Millen, to which we were afterward 
transferred. The Rebels styled it officially " Camp Lawton," 
but we called it always " Millen." 

Having our huts finished, the next solicitude was about 
escape, and this was the burden of our thoughts, day and 
night. We held conferences, at which every man was required 
to contribute all the geographical knowledge of that section of 
•Georgia that he might have left over from his schoolboy days, and 
also that gained by persistent questionmg of such guards and 
other Rebels as he had come in contact with. "When first 
landed in the prison we were as ignorant of our whereabouts 
as if we had been dropped into the center of Africa. But one 
of the prisoners was found to have a fragment of a school atlas, 
in which was an outline map of Georgia, that had Macon, 
Atlanta, Milledgeville, and Savannah laid down upon it. As 
we knew we had come southward from Macon, we felt pretty 
certain we were in the southwestern corner of the State. 
Conversations with guards and others gave us the information 
that the Chattahooche flowed some two score of miles to the 
westward, and that the Flint lay a little nearer on the east. 
Our map showed that these two united and flowed together 
into Appalachicola Ray, where, some of us remembered, a 
newspaper item had said that we had gunboats stationed. The 



A BTOUY OF REBEL MILITAHY PKISONS. 



139 



creek that ran through the stockade fl'^^ved to the east, and vre 
reasoned that if we followed its course we would be led to the 
Flint, down which we could float on a log or raft to the Appa- 
lachicola. This was the favorite scheme of the party with 
which I sided. Another party believed the most feasible plan 




mm 



pii|ijffii!|iiijii(:llv:1u 




SCALING THE STOCKADE. 

was to go northward, and endeavor to gain the mountains, and 
thence get into East Tennessee. 

But the main thing was to get away from the stockade; 
this, as the French say of all first steps, was wliat would cost. 

Our first attempt was made about a week after our arrival. 
We found two logs on the cast side that were a couple of feet 
shorter than the rest, ar.d it seemed as if tl:«By could be successfully 
scaled. About fifty of us resolved to make the attempt. "We 
made a rope twenty-five or thirty feet long, and strong enough 



140 AKDEKSONVILLE. 

to bear a man, out of strings and strips of cloth. A stout stick 
was fastened to the end, so that it would catch on the logs on 
either side of the gap. On a night dark enough to favor our 
scheme, we gathered together, drew cuts to determine each boy's 
place in the line, fell in single rank, according to this arrange- 
ment, and marched to the ])lace. The line was thrown skillfully^ 
the stick caught fairly in the notch, and the boy who had drawn 
number one climbed up amid a suspense so keen that I could 
hear my heart beating. It seemed ages before he reached the- 
top, and that the noise he made must certainly attract the 
attention of the guard. It did not. AVe saw our comrade's 
figure outlined against the sky as he slid over the top, and then 
iieard the dull thump as he sprang to the ground on the other 
■side. " Number two," was whispered by our leader, and h& 
performed the feat as successfully as his predecessor. " Number 
three," and he followed noiselessly^ and quickl}^ Thus it went 
on, until, just as we heard number fifteen drop, we also heard a 
Rebel voice say in a vicious undertone : 

" Halt ! halt, there, d n you ! " 

This was enough. The game was up ; we were discovered, 
and the remaining thirty-live of us left that locality with all 
the speed in our heels, getting away just m time to escape a 
volley which a squad of guards, posted in the lookouts, poured 
upon the spot where we had been standing. 

The next morning the fifteen who had got over the Stockade 
were brought in, each chained to a sixty-four pound ball- 
Their story was that one of the N' Yaarkers, who had become 
cognizant of our scheme, had sought to obtain favor in the 
Rebel eyes by betraying us. The Rebels stationed a squad at 
the crossing place, and as each man dropped down from the 
Stockade he was caught by the shoulder, the muzzle of a revolver 
thrust into his face, and an order to surrender whispered into 
his ear. It was expected that the guards in the sentry-boxes 
would do such execution among those of us still inside as would 
prove a warning to other would-be escapes. They were defeated 
in this benevolent intention by the readiness with which we 
divined the meaning of that incautiously loud halt, and our 
alacrity in leaving the unhealthy locality. 



A 8T0EY OF KECEI- jriLITARY PRISONS. 141 

The traitorous N' Yaarker was rewarded with a detail into 
the commissary department, where he fed and fattened like a 
rat that had secured undisturbed homestead rights in the center 
of a cheese. When the miserable remnant of us were leaving 
Andersonville months afterward, I saw him, sleek, rotund, and 
well-clothed, lounging leisurely in the door of a tent. He 
regarded us a moment contemptuously, and then went on con- 
versing with a fellow N'Yaarker, in the foul slang that none 
but such as he were low enough to use. 

I have always imagined that the fellow returned home, at 
the close of the war, and became a prominent member of 
Tweed's gang. 

We protested against the barbarity of compelling men to 
wear irons for exercising their natural right of attempting to 
escape, but no attention was })aid to our protest 

Another result of this abortive eifort was the estabhshment 
of the notorious " Dead Line." A few daj^s later a gang of 
negros came in and drove a line of stakes down at a distance of 
twenty feet from the stockade. They nailed upon this a strip 
of stuff four inches wide, and then an order was issued that if 
this was crossed, or even touched, the guards would fire upon 
the offender without warning. 

Our surveyor figured up this new contraction of our space, 
and came to the conclusion that the Dead Line and the Swamp 
took up about three acres, and we were left now only thirteen 
acres. This was not of much consequence then, however, as we 
still had plenty of room. 

The first man w^as killed the morning after the Dead-Liire was 
put up. The victim was a German, wearing the white crescent 
of the Second Division of the Eleventh Corps, whom we had 
nicknamed " Sigel." Hardship and exposure had crazed him, 
and brought on a severe attack of St. Yitus's dance.' As he 
went hobbling around with a vacuous grin upon his face, he 
spied an old piece of cloth lymg on the ground inside the Dead 
Line. He stooped down and reached under for it. At that 
instant the guard fired. The charge of ball-and-buck entered 
the poor old fellow's shoulder and tore through his body. He 
fell dead, still clutching the dirty rag that had cost him his 
life. 



CITAPTEE XIX. 

CArT, IIE'xKI WIRZ SOME DESCEirXIOiSr OF A SIMALL-MINDED PEK- 

SOXAGE, WHO GAINED GREAT NOTORIETY FIKST EXPERIENCE 

WITH HIS DISCIPLINARY METHOD. 

The emptying of the prisons at Danville and Richmond into 
Anderson ville went on sloudy dming the month of March. 
They came in by train loads of from five hundred to eight, 
hundred, at intervals of two or three days. By the end of the 
month there were about live thousand in the stockade. There 
was a fair amount of space for this number, and as yet we 
suffered no inconvenience from our crowding, though most 
persons would fancy that thirteen acres of ground was a rathei" 
limited area for five thousand men to live, move and have their 
being u [)on. Yet a few weeks later we were to see seven times 
that many packed into that space. 

One morning a new^ Eebel officer came in to superintend 
calling the roll. He was an undersized, fidgety man, with an 
insignfficant face, and a month that protruded like a rabbit's. 
His bright little eyes, like those of a squirrel or a rat, assisted 
in giving his countenance a look of kinship to the family of 
rodent animals — a genus which lives by stealth and cunning, 
subsisting on that wdiich it can steal away from stronger and 
braver creatures.. He was dressed in a pair of gray trousers 
with the other part of his body covered with a calico garment, 
like that which small boj's used to wear, called " waists." This 
was fastened to the pantaloons by buttons,. precisely as w^as the 
custom with the garments of boys struggling with the ortho- 
graphy of Avords in two syllables. Upon his head was perched 
a little gra\' cap. Sticking in his belt, and fastened to his 



A 8T0EY OF KEBEL MILITABY PRISONS. 



14a 




"wnst by a strap two or three feet long, was. one of those for. 
midable lookmg, but harmless English revolvers, that have ten 
barrels around the edge of the cylinder, and fire a musket- 
buUet from the center. The wearer of this composite costume, 
and bearer of 'this amateur arsenal, 
stepped nervously about and sputtered 
volubly in very broken English. lie 
said to Wry-]Srecked Smith : 

" Py Gott, you don't vatch dem dam 
Yiinkees glose enough ! Dey are schlip- 
pin' rount, and peatin' you efery dimes." 
This was Captain Henri Wirz, the 
new commandant of the interior of the 
prison. There has been a great deal of 
misapprehension of tlie character of 
"Wirz. He is usually regarded as a 
villain of large mental caliber, and 
with a genius for cruelty. He was 
nothing of the kind. He was simply 
contemptible, from whatever point of 
view he was studied. Gnat-brained, 
cowardly, and feeble natured, he had 
not a quahty that commanded respect 
from any one who knew him. Ilis 
cruelty did not seem designed so 
much as the ebullitions of a peevish, 
snarling little temper, united to a mind incapable of conceiving 
the results of his acts, or understanding the pain he was 
inflicting. 

I never heard anything of his profession or vocation before 
entering the army. I always beheved, howevei', that he had 
been a clieap clerk in a small dry-goods store, a third or fourth 
rate book-keeper, or something similar. Imagine, if you please, 
oiie such, who never had brains or self-command sufficient to 
control liimself, placed in command of thirty-five thousand 
men. Being a fool he could not help being an infliction to 
them, even with the best of intentions, and AVirz was not 
troubled witli good intentions. 

I mention the probability of his having been a dry-goods. 







CAPTAIN UENRI WIBZ. 



144 A2n)ERS0NVILLE. 

clerk or book-keeper, not with any disrespect to two honorable 
vocations, but because Wirz had had some training as an 
accountant, and this was what gave him the place over us. 
Rebels, as a rule, are astonishingly ignorant of arithmetic and 
accounting, generally. They are good* shots, fine horsemen, 
ready speakers and ardent pohticians, but, Like Sll non-comraer-, 
cial people, they flounder hopelessly in what people of this 
section would consider simple mathematical processes. One of 
our constant amusements was in befogging and " beating " those 
charged with calling rolls and issuing rations. It was not at 
all difficult at times to make a hundred men count as a hundred 
and ten, and so on. 

Wirz cotild count beyond one hundred, and this determined 
his selection for the place. Ilis first move was a stupid change. 
"We had been grouped in the natural way into hundreds and 
thousands. lie re-arranged the men in " squads " of ninety, and 
three of these — two hundred and seventy men — mto a " de- 
tachment." The detachments were numbered in order from 
the Xorth Gate, and the squads were numbered " one, two, 
three," On the rolls this was stated after the man's name. 
For instance, a chum of mine, and in the same squad with me, 
was Charles L. Soule, of the Third Michigan Infantry. Ilis 
name appeared on the rolls : 

" Chas. L. Soule, priv. Co. E, 3d Mich. Inf., 1-2." 

That is, he belonged to the Second Squad of the First De- 
tachment. 

Where Wirz got his preposterous idea of organization from 
has alwaj's been a mystery to me. It was awkward in every 
wa}'' — in drawing rations, counting, dividing into messes, etc. 

Wirz was not long in giving us a taste of his quality. The 
next morning after his first appearance he came in when roll- 
call was sounded, and ordered all the squads and detachments 
to form, and remain standing in ranks until all were counted. 
Any soldier Avill say that there is no duty more annoying and 
difficult than standing still in ranks for any considerable length 
of time, especially when there is nothing to do or to engage 
the attention. It took Wirz between two and three hours to 
<K)unt the whole camp, and by that tune we of the first detach- 



A BTOET OF REBEL MILITARY PKISONS. 145 

merits were almost all out of ranks. Thereupon Wirz an- 
nounced that no rations would be issued to the camp that day. 
The orders to stand in ranks were repeated the next morning, 
with a warning that a failure to obey would be punished as 
that of the previous day had been. Though we were so hungry, 
that, to use the words of a Thirty-Fifth Pennsylvanian standing 
next to me — his " big intestines were eating his little ones up," 
it was impossible to keep the rank formation during the long 
hours. One man after another straggled away, and again we 
lost our rations. That afternoon Ave became desperate. Plots 
were considered for a daring assault to force the gates or scale the 
stockade. The men were crazy enough to attempt anj^thing rather 
than sit down and patiently starve. Many offered themselves as 
leaders in any attempt that it might be thought best to make. 
The hopelessness of any such venture was apparent, even to 
famished men, and the propositions went no farther than in- 
flammatory tallv. 

The third morning the orders were again repeated. This 
time we succeeded in remaining in ranks in such a manner as 
to satisfy AYirz, and Ave Avere given our rations for that day, 
but those of the other days were permanently withheld. 

That afternoon Wirz ventui-od into camp alone. lie was 
assailed Avith a storm of curses and execrations, and a shower 
of clubs. lie pulled out his revolver, as if to lire upon his 
assaila.nts. A yell was raised to take his pistol away from him 
and a croAA^d rushed forward to do this. Without Avaiting to 
fire a shot, he turned and ran to the gate for dear life. lie did 
not come in again for a long while, and never after Avard Avithout 
a retinue of guards. 
10 



CHAPTER XX. 

PEIZB-FIGHT AMOJTG THE n'yAARKEKS A GREAT MANT FORMALI- 
TIES, AND LITTLE BLOOD SPILT A FUTILE ATTEMPT TO KECOVEB 

A WATCH DEFEAT OF THE LAW AND ORDER PARTY. 

One of the train-loads from Richmond was almost wholly 
made up of our old acquaintances — the K'Taarkers. The 
number of these had swelled t<> i'our hundred or five hundred 
— all leagued together in the fellowship of crime. 

"We did not manifest any keen desu'e for intimate social rela- 
tions with them, and they did not seem to hunger for our 
society, so they moved across the creek to the unoccupied South 
Side, and established their camp there, at a considerable dis- 
tance from us. 

One afternoon a number of us went across to their camp, to 
witness a fight according to the rules of the Prize Ring, which 
was to come off between two professional pugilists. These 
were a couple of bounty- jumpers who had some httle reputa- 
tion in New York sporting circles, under the names of the 
" Staleybridge Chicken " and the " Haarlem Infant." 

On the ^\'ay from Richmond a cast-iron sldllet, or spider, had 
been stolen by the crowd from the Rebels. It was a small 
affair, holding a half gallon, and worth to-day about fifty 
cents. In Anderson ville its worth was literally above rubies. 
Two men belonging to different messes each claimed the 
ownership of the utensil, on the ground of being most active 
in securing it. Their claims were strenuously supported by 
their respective messes, at the heads of which were the afore- 
said Infant and Chicken. A great deal of strong talk, and 
several indecisive knock-downs resulted in an agreement to 



A STOKY OF KEiJEI. MILITAKT PKISONS. 



147 



settle the mattev by wager of battle between the Infant and 
Chicken. 

Wlien Ave arrived a twenty-four foot ring had been pre]"Kired 
by drawing a deep marl: in the sand. In diagonalh' opposite 
corners of these the seconds were kneeling on one knee and 
supporting their principals on the otlier. J'y their sid(3s they 
had little vessels of water, and bundles of rajcrs to answer for 




THE PlilZE-FIGHT FOE THE SKILLET. 

sponges. Another corner was occupied by the umpire, a foul- 
mouthed, loud-tongued Tombs shyster, named Pete Cradley- 
A long-bodied, short-legged hoodlum, nick-named " Ileenan," 
armed with a club, acted as ring keeper, and " belted " back, 
remorselessly, any of the spectators who crowded over the 
hne. Did he see a foot obtruding itself so much as an inch 
over the mark in the sand — and the pressure from the crowd 
behind was so great that it was difficult for the front fell6ws to 
keep off the line — his heavy club and a blasting curse would 
fall upon the offender simultaneously. 
Every effort ^vas made to have aU things conform as nearly 



148 AKDEKSONVILLK. 

as possible to the recognized practices of the " London Prize 
King." 

At Bradley's call of " Time ! " the principals would rise from 
their seconds' knees, advance briskly to the scratch across the 
center of the ring, and spar away sharply for a little time, 
until one got m a blow that sent the other to the ground, 
where he would lie until his second picked him up, carried him 
back, washed his face off, and gave him a drink. He then 
rested until the next call of time. 

This sort of performance went on for an hour or more, with 
the knock-downs and other casualties pretty evenly divided 
between the two. Then it became apparent that the Infant 
was getting more than he had storage room for. His interest 
in the skillet was evidently abating, the leering grin he wore 
upon his face during the early part of the engagement had dis- 
appeared long ago, as the successive " hot ones " which the 
Chicken had succeeded in planting upon his mouth, put it out 
of his power to "^^smile and smile," "e'en though he might 
stiU be a villain." He began coming up to the scratch as slug- 
gishly as a hired man starting out for his day's Avork, and 
finally he did not come up at aU. A bunch of blood soaked 
rags was tossed into the air from his corner, and Bradley 
declared the Chicken to be the victor, amid entluisiastic cheers 
Crora the crowd. 

, Wo voted the thing rather tame. In the whole hour and 
a-half there was not so much savage fighting, not so much 
damage done, as a couple of earnest, but unscientific men, who 
have no time to waste, will frequently crowd into an im- 
promptu affair not exceeding five minutes in duration. 

Our next visit to the N'Taarkers was on a different errand. 
The moment they arrived in camp we began to be annoyed by 
their depredations. Blanlvcts — the sole protection of men — 
would be snatched off as they slept at night. Articles of 
clothinf^ and cooking utensils Avould go the same way, and 
occasionally a man would be robbed in open daylight. All 
these, it was believed, with good reason, were the work of the 
N'.Yaarkers, and the stolen things were conveyed to their 
camp. Occasionally depredators would be caught and beaten, 
but they Avould give a signal which would bring to their assist- 



A 8T0BT OF REBEL MILITAEY PRISONS. 149 

ance the whole body of iST'Yaarkers, and turn the tables on 
their assailants. 

"We had in our squad a little watchmaker named Dan Mar- 
tin, of the Eighth New York Infantry. Other boys let him 
take their watches to tinker up, so as to make a show of run- 
ning, and be available for trading to the guards. 

One day Martin was at the creek, when a N'Yaarker asked 
him to let him look at a watch. Martin incautiously did so, 
when the N'Yaarker snatched it and sped away to the camp 
of his crowd, Martin ran bacli: to us and told his story. 
This was the last feather which was to break the cameFs back 
of our patience. Peter Bates, of the Third Michigan, the 
Sergeant of our squad, had considerable confidence in his mus- 
cular ability. He flamed up into mighty wrath, and swore a 
sulphurous oath that we would get that watch back, whereupon 
about two hundred of us avowed our wilhngness to help re- 
claim it. 

Each of us providing ourselves with a club, we started on 
our errand. The rest of the camp — about four thousand — 
gathered on the hillside to watch us. "We thought they might 
have sent us some assistance, as it was about as much their 
fight as ours, but they did not, and we were too proud to ask 
it. The crossing of the swamp was quite diiTicult. Only one 
could go over at a time, and he very slowly. The l^'Yaarkers 
understood that trouble was pending, and they began mustering 
to receive us. From the way they tilrned out it was evident 
that we should have come over with three hundred instead of 
two hundred, but it was too late then to alter the program. 
As we came up a stalwart Irishman stepped out and asked us 
what we wanted. 

Bates replied : " AYe have come over to get a watch that one 

of your fellows took from one of ours, and by we're going 

to have it." 

The Irishman's reply was equally explicit though not strictly 

logical in construction. Said he : " We havn't got your 

watch, and be ye can t have it." 

This joined the issue just as fairlv as if it had been done by 
aU the documentary formulae that passea between Turkey and 
Russia prior to the late war. Bates and the Irishman then ex- 



150 ANDERSON VILLE. 

changed very derogatory opinions of each other, and began 
strildng with their clubs. The rest of us took this as our cue, 
and each, selectiai?' as small a N'Yaarker as we could readily 
find, sailed in. 

There is a very expressive bit of slang coming into general 
use in the West, which speaks of a man •' biting off more than 
he can chew." 

That is what we had done. We had taken a contract that 
we should have divided, and sub-let the bigger half. Two 
minutes after the engagement became genei-al there was no 
doubt that we ^voldd have been much better off if we had 
staid on our own side of the creek. The watch was a very 
poor one, an^'how. We thought we Avoald just say good day 
to our N'Yaark friends, and return home hastily. But they 
declined to be left so precipitately. They ^^antcd to stay with 
us awhile. It Avas lots of fun for them, and for the four 
thousand A^elling spectators on the opposite hill, Avho were 
greatly enjoying our discomfiture. There was liardly enough 
of the amusement to go clear around, however, and it all fell 
short just before it reached us. "We earnestly wished that 
some of tlie boj^s would come over and help us let go of the 
N'Yaarkers, but they were enjoying the thing too much to 
interf{?i*e. 

We were driven down the liill, pell-mell, with the ]Sr'Yaarkers 
pursuing hotly with yell and blow. At the swamp we tried to 
make a stand to secure our passage across, but it was only par- 
tially successful. Yery few got back without some severe 
hurts, and many received blows that greatly hastened their 
deaths. 

After this the X'Yaarkers became bolder in their robberies, 
and more arrogaiit in their demeanor than ever, and we had 
the poor revenge upon those who would not assist us, of seeing 
a reign of terror inaugurated over the whole camp. 



CHAPTEK XXL 

DiMnasBmsro rations — a deadly cold -rats — hoveking oveb 

PITCH PLNE FIRES IKCKEASE OF MOIiTALITY A TUEOP.Y OF 

HEALTH. 

The rations diminished perceptibly day by day. When we 
first entered we each received something over a quart of toler- 
ably good meal, a sweet potato, a piece of meat about the size 
of one's two fingers, and occasionally a spoonful oi salt. First 
the salt disappeared. Then the sweet potato took unto itself 
wings and flew away, never to return. An attempt was osten- 
sibly made to issue us cow-peas instead, and the first issue was 
only a quart to a detachment of two hundred and seventy men. 
This vcas two-tliirds of a pint to each squad of ninety, and made 
but a few spoonfuls for each of the four messes in the squad. 
"When it came to dividing among the men, the beans had to bo 
counted. Nobody received enough to pay for cooking, and we 
were at a loss what to do until somebody suggested that we 
play poker for them. This met' general acceptance, and after 
that, as long as beans were drawn, a large portion of the day 
was spent in absorbing games of "bluff" and "draw," at a 
bean " ante," and no " limit." 

After a number of hours' diligent playing, some luclcy or 
skillful player would be in possession of all the beans in a mess, 
a squad, and sometimes a detachment, and have enough for a 
good meal. 

Next the meal began to diminish in quantity and deteriorate 
in quality. It became so exceedingly coarse that the common 
remark was that the next step would be to bring us the com in 
the shock, and feed it to us like stock. Then meat followed 



152 AJSfDERSONYILLK 

suit with the rest. The rations decreased in size, and the num- 
ber of days that we did not get an}'-, kept constantly increasing 
in proportion to the days that we did, until eventually the meat 
bade us a final adieu, and joined the sweet potato in that 
undiscovered country from whose bourne no ration ever 
returned. 

The fuel and building material in the stockade were speedily 
exliausted. The later comers had nothing whatever to build 
shelter with. 

But, after tlie Spring rains had fairly set in, it seemed that 
we had not tasted misery until then. About the middle of 
March the windows of heaven opened, and it began a rain like 
that of the time of jSToah. It was tropical in quantity and persis- 
tenc}^, and arctic in temperature. For dreary hours that 
lengthened hito weary days and nights, and these again into 
never-ending weeks, the driving, drenching flood poured down 
upon the sodden earth, searching the veiy marrow of the five 
thousand hapless men against whose chilled frames it beat with 
pitiless monotony, and soaked the sand bank upon which we lay 
until it was like a sponge filled with ice-water. It seems to me 
now that it must have been two or three weeks that the sun 
was vrholly hidden behind the dripping clouds, not shining out 
once in all that time. The intervals when it did not rain were 
rare and short. An hour's respite would be followed by a day 
of steady, regular pelting of the great rain drops. 

I find that the report of the Smithsonian Institute gives the 
average annual rainfall in the section around Andersonville, at 
fifty-six inches — nearly five feet — while that of foggy England 
is only thirty-two. Our experience would lead me to think 
that ^VG got the five feet all at once. 

"VVe first comers, who had huts, were measurably better off 
than the later arrivals. It was much drier in our leaf- 
thatched tents, and we were spared much of the annoyance 
that comes from the steady dasii of rain against the body for 
hours. 

The condition of those who had no tents was truly pitiable. 
They sat or lay on the hiU-side the live-long day and night, 
and took the washing flow with such gloomy composure as they 
could muster. 



A STORY OF REBEL MILITART PRISONS. 153 

All soldiers will agree with me that there is no campaigning 
hardship comparable to a cold rain. One can brace up against 
the extremes of heat and cold, and mitigate their inclemency 
in various ways. Eut there is no escaping a long-continued, 
chilling rain. It seems to penetrate to the heart, and leach 
away the very vital force. 

The only relief attainable was found in huddling over little 
fires kept alive by small groups with their slender stocks of 
wood. As this wood was all pitch-pine, that burned with a 
very sooty flame, the effect upon the appearance of the hover- 
ers was startling. Face, neck and hands became covered with 
mixture of lampblack and turpentine, forming a coating as 
thick as heavy brown paper, and absolutely ii^removable by 
water alone. The hair also became of midnight blackness, and 
gummed up into elf-locks of fantastic shape and effect. Any 
one of us could have gone on the negro minstrel stage, without 
changing a hair, and put to blush the most elaborate make-up 
of the grotesque burnt-cork artists. 

ISTo wood was issued to us. The only way of getting it was 
to stand around the gate for hours until a guard off duty could 
be coaxed or hired to accompany a small party to the woods, 
to bring back a load of such knots and limbs as could be picked 
up. Our chief persuaders to the guards to do us this favor 
were rings, pencils, knives, combs, and such trifles as we might 
have in our pockets, and, more especially, the brass buttons on 
our uniforms. Eebel soldiers, like Indians, negros and other 
imperfectly civilized people, were passionately fond of bright 
and gaudy things. A handful of brass buttons would catch 
every one of them as swiftly and as surely as a piece of red 
flannel wiU a gudgeon. Our regular fee for an escort for three 
of us to the woods was six over-coat or dresscoat buttons, or ten 
or twelve jacket buttons. All in the mess contributed to this 
fund, and the fuel obtained was carefully guarded and hus- 
banded. 

This manner of conducting the wood business is a fair sam- 
ple of the management, or rather the lack of it, of every other 
detail of prison administration. All the hardships we suffered 
from lack of fuel and shelter could have been p?eTe7itcd with- 
out the slightest expense or trouble to the Conl'jdfjracy. Two 



154 AITDEKSONTILLE. 

hundred men alloTred to go out on parole, and supplied with 
axes, would have brought in from the adjacent woods, in a 
"week's time, enough material to make everybody comfortable 
tents, and to supply all the fuel needed. 

The mortality caused by the storm was, of course, very 
great. The official report s?.ys the total number in the prison 
in March was four tliousand six hundred and three, of whom 
two hundred and eighty-three died. 

Among the first to die was the one whom we expected to 
live longest. He was by much the largest man in prison, and 
was called, because of this, " Big Joe." He was a Sergeant in 
the Fifth Pennsylvania Cavalry, and seemed the picture of 
health. One mornmg the news ran through the prison that 
" Big Joe is dead," and a visit to his squad showed his stiff, 
lifeless form, occupying as much ground as Gohah's, after his 
encounter with David. 

His early demise was an example of a general law, the work- 
ings of which few in the arm}'' failed to notice. It was always 
the large and strong who first succumbed to hardship. The 
stalwart, huge-limbed, toil-inured men sank down earhest on 
the march, yielded soonest to malarial influences, and fell first 
under the combined effects of home-sickness, exposure and the 
privations of army life. The slender, -^^dthy boys, as supple 
and Aveak as cats, had apparently the nine lives of those ani- 
mals. There were few exceptions to this rule in the a-rmy — 
there were none in Andersonville. I can recall few or no 
instances where a large, strong, " hearty " man lived thi'ough a 
few months of imprisonment. The survivors were invariably 
youths, at the verge of manliood, — slender, quick, active, 
medium-statured fellows, of a cheerful temperament, in whom 
one would have expected comparatively little po^vers of endur- 
ance. 

The theory which I constructed for ray own private use hi 
accounting for this phenomenon I offer with proper diffidence 
to others who may be in search of a hypothesis to explain facts 
that they have observed. It is this : 

a. The circulation of the blood maintains health, and conse- 
quently life by carrying away from the various parts of the 
body the particles of worn-out and poisonous tissue, and replac- 
ing thern with fresh, structure-building nuiteriai. 



A 8TOEY OF BEBEL MILITAKT PEISOiSrS. 155 

h. The man is healthiest in whom this process goes on most 
freely and continuoiisl}^ 

c. Men of considerable muscular power are disposed to be 
sluggish ; the exertion of great strength does not favor circula- 
tion. It rather retards it, and disturbs its equilibrium by con- 
gesting the blood in quantities in the sets of muscles called into 
action. 

d. In light, active men, on the other hand, the cii'culation 
goes on perfectly and evenly, because all the parts are put in 
motion, and kept so in such a manner as to promote the move- 
ment of the blood to every extremity. They do not strain one 
set of muscles by long continued effort, as a strong man does, 
but call one into play after another. 

There is no compulsion on the reader to accept tins specula- 
tion at any valuation whatever. There is not even any charge 
for it. I will lay dovrn this simple axiom : 

JVo strong man is a healthy laaii — 

from the athlete in the circus who lifts pieces of artillery and 
catches cannon balls, to the exhibition swell in a country gym- 
nasium. If my theory is not a sufficient explanation of this, 
there is nothing to prevent the reader from building up one to 
suit him better. 



CHAPTER XXn. 

DIFFEKENCE BETWEEK ALABAillANS AND GEORGIANS — DEATH OP 

"poll PAREOTT" A GOOD JOKE UPON THE GUARD — A BRUTAL 

RASCAL. 

There were two regiments guarding us — the Twenty-Sixth 
Alabama and the Fifty-Fifth Georgia. Xever were two regi- 
ments of the same army more different. The Alabamians were 
the superiors of the Georgians in every way that one set of men 
could be superior to another. They were manly, soldierly, 
and honorable, where the Georgians were treacherous and brutal. 
We had nothing to complain of at the hands of the Alabami- 
ans ; we suffered from the Georgians everything that mean- 
spirited cruelty could devise. The Georgians were always on 
the look-out for something that they could torture into such 
apparent violation of orders, as would justify them in shooting 
men down ; the Alabamians never fired until they were satisfied 
that a deliberate offense was intended. I can recall of my own 
seeing at least a dozen'instances where] men of the Fifty-Fifth 
Georgia killed prisoners under the pretense that they were 
across the Dead Line, when the victims were a yard or more from 
the Dead Line, and had not the remotest idea of going any 
nearer. 

The only man I ever knew to be killed by one of the 
Twenty-Sixth Alabama was named Hubbard, from Chicago, 
Ills., and a member of the Thh-ty-Eighth Ilhnois. He had 
lost one leg, and went hobbling about the camp on crutches, 
chattering continually in a loud, discordant voice, saying all 
manner of hateful and annoying things, wherever he saw an 
opportunity. This and his beak-hke nose gained for him the 



A BTOET OF EEBEL MlLITAfiY PRISONS. 157 

name of " Poll Parrot." Ilis misfortune caused him to be 
'tolerated where another man would have been suppressed. 
By-and-by he gave still greater cause for offense by his obse- 
quious attempts to curry favor with Captain Wirz, who took 
him outside several times for purposes that were not well 
explained. Finally, some hours after one of Poll Parrot's vis- 
its outside, a Rebel officer came ui with a guard, and, pro- 
ceeding with suspicious directness to a tent which was the 
mouth of a lar<2:e tunnel that a hundred men or more had been 
qmetly pushing for'ward, broke the tunnel in, and took the 
occupants of the tent outside for punishment. The question 
that demanded immediate solution then was — 

" Who is the traitor who has informed the Eebels ? " 

Suspicion pointed very strongly to " PoU Parrot." By the 
next morning the evidence collected seemed to amount to a 
certainty, and a crowd caught the Parrot ^vith the intention of 
lynching him. He succeeded in breaking away from them and 
ran under the Dead Line, near where I Avas sitting in my tent. 
At first it looked as if he had done this to secure the protection 
of the guard. The latter — a Twenty-Sixth Alabamian — or- 
dered him out. Poll Parrot rose up on his one leg, put his 
back against the Dead Line, faced the guard, and said in his 
harsh, cackhng voice : 

" Is o ; I won't go out. If I've lost the confidence of my 
comrades I want to die.' 

Part of the crowd were taken back by this move, and felt 
disposed to accept it as a demonstration of the Parrot's inno- 
cence. The rest thought it was a piece of bravado, because of 
his belief that the Pebels would not injure him after he had 
served them. They renewed their yells, the guard again or- 
dered the Parrot out, but the latter, tearing open his blouse, 
cackled out : 

" No, I won't go ; fire at me, guard. There's my heart ; 
shoot me right there." 

There was no help for it. The Rebel leveled his gun and 
fired. The charge struck the Parrot's lower jaw, and carried 
it completely awa}^, leaving his tongue and the roof of his 
mouth exposed. As he Avas carried back to die, he wagged his 
tongue A-igorously, in attempting to speak, but it was of no use. 



158 ANDEESONVn.LE. 

The guard set his gun do^yn and buried his face in his hands. 
It was the only time that I saw a sentinel show anything but 
exultation at killing a Yankee. 

A ludicrous contrast to this took place a few nights later. 
The rains had ceased, the weather had become warmer, and our 
spirits rising wdth this increase in the comfort of our surround- 
uigs, a number of us were sitting around " Nosey " — a boy 
with a superb tenor voice — who was singing patriotic songs. 
We were coming in strong on the chorus, in a way that spoke 
vastly more for our enthusiasm for the Union than our musical 
knowledge. "Nosey" sang the "Star Spangled Banner," 
" The Battle Cry of Freedom," " Brave Boys are They," etc., 
capitally, and we threw our whole lungs into the chorus. It 
was quite dark, and while our noise was going on the guards 
changed, new men coming on duty. Suddenly, bang I went 
the gun of the guard in the box about fifty feet away from us. 
"We knew it was a Fifty-Fifth Georgian, and supposed that, 
irritated at our singing, he was trying to kiU some of us for 
spite. At the sound of the gun we jumped up and scattered. As 
no one gave the usual agonized yell of a prisoner when shot, we 
supposed the ball had not taken effect. We could hear the 
sentinel ramming down another cartridge, hear him " return 
rammer," and cock his rifle. Again the gun cracked, and again 
there was no sound of anybody being hit. Again we could 
hear the sentry churning down another cartridge. The drums 
began beating the long roll in the camp§, and officers could be 
heard turning the men out. The thing was becoming exciting, 
and one of us sang out to the guard : 

" S-a-y ! What the are you shooting at, any how ?" 

" I'm a shootin' at that Yank thar, by the Dead 

Line, and by if you'uns don't take him in I'U blow the 

whole head off'n him." 

" What Yank ? Where's any Yank 'i " 

"Why, thar — right thar — a-standin' agin the Ded Line." 

" Wh}^, you Eebel fool, that's a chunk of wood. You 

can't get any furlough for shooting that ! " 

At this there was a general roar from the rest of the camp, 
which the other guards took up, and as the Reserves came 
double-quicking up, and learned the occasion of the alarm, they 



A STORY OF KEBEL MILITARY PRISONS. 159 

gave the rascal who had been so anxious to hill somebody a 
torrent of abuse for having disturbed them. 

A part of oar crowd had been out after wood during the 
day, and secured a piece of a log as large as two of them could 
carry, and bringing it in, stood it up near the Dead Line. 
When the guard mounted to his post he was sure he saw a 
temerarious Yankee in front of him, and hastened to slay him. 

It was an unusual good fortune that nobody was struck. It 
was very rare that the guards fired into the prison without hit- 
ting at least one person. The Georgia Eeserves, who formed 
our guards later in the season, were armed with an old gun 
called a Queen Anne musket, altered to percussion. It carried 
a bullet as big as a large marble, and three or four buckshot. 
When fired into a group of men it was sure to bring several 
down. 

I was standing one day in the line at the gate, waiting for a 
chance to go out after wood. A Fifty-Fifth Georgian was the 
gate guard, and he drew a line in the sand with his bayonet 
which we should not cross. The crowd behind pushed one man 
tiU he put his foot a few inches over the line, to save himself 
from falling ; the guard sank a bayonet through the foot as 
quick as a flash. 



CHAPTEK XXm. 

A NEW LOT OT" TKISONERS — THE BATTLE OP OOLITBTEE MEN 

SACEIEICED TO A GENERAL' 8 INCOMPETENCY A HOODLUM KE-IN- 

FOIiCEMENT A QUEER CROWD MISTREATMENT OF AN OFFICEB 

OF A COLORED REGIMENT KILLING THE SERGEANT OF A NEGRO 

SQUAD. 

So far only old prisoners — those taken at Gettysburg, 
Cliicamauga and Mine Eim — had been brought in. The armies 
had been very quiet during the Winter, preparing for the death 
grapple in the Spring. There had been nothing done, save a 
_ few cavalry raids, such as our own, and Averill's attempt to 
gain and break up the Rebel salt works at Wj^theville, and 
Saltvillo. Consequently none but a few cavalry prisoners were 
added to the number already in the hands of the Rebels. 

Tlie first lot of nevr ones came in about the middle of March. 
There were about seven hundred of them, who had been cap- 
tured at the battle of Oolustee, Fla., on the 20th of February. 
About five hundred of them were white, and belonged to the 
Seventh Connecticut, the Seventh New Hampshire, Fort}''- 
Seventh, Forty-Eighth and One Hundred and Fifteenth New 
York, and Sherman's regular battery. The rest were colored, 
and belonged to the Eighth United States, and Fifty-Fourth 
Massachusetts. 

The story they told of the battle was one which had many 
shameful reiterations during the war. It was ^the story told 
whenever Banks, Sturgis, Butler, or one of a host of similar 
smaller failures were intrusted with commands. It was a 
senseless waste of the lives of private soldiers, and the property 
of the United States by pretentious blunderers, who, in some 



A STOEY OF REBEL MILlTAEY PEISONS. 16i 

inscrutable manner, had attained to responsible commands. In 
this instance, a bungling Brigadier named Seymore had 
marched his forces across the State of Florida, to do he hardly 
knew what, and in the neighborhood of an enemy of whose 
numbers, disposition, location, and inteiitionshe was profoundly 
ignorant. The Eebels, under General Finnegan, waited till he 
had strung his command along through swamps and cane 
brakes, scores of miles from his supports, and then fell unex- 
pectedly upon his advance. The regiment was overpowered, 
and another regiment that hurried up to its support, suffered 
the same fate. The balance of the regiments were sent in in 
the same manner — each arriving on the field just after its pre- 
decessor had been thoroughly whipped by the concentrated 
force of the Rebels. The men fought gallantly, but the 
stupidity of a Commanding General is a thing that the gods 
themselves strive against in vain. We suffered a humiliating 
defeat, with a loss of two thousand men and a fine rifled bat- 
tery, which was brought to Andersonville and placed in posi- 
tion to command the prison. 

The majority of the Seventh New Hampshire were an un- 
welcome addition to our numbers. They were N'Yaarkers — 
old time colleagues of those already in with us — veteran 
bounty jumpers, that had been drawn to l^ew Hampshire by 
the size of the bounty offered there, and had been assigned to 
fill up the wasted ranks of the veteran Seventh regiment. 
They had tried to desert as soon as they received their bounty, 
but the Government clung to them literally with hooks of steel, 
sending man}^ of them to the regiment in irons. Thus foiled, 
they deserted to the Eebels during the retreat from the battle- 
field. They were quite an accession to the force of our 
N'Yaarkers, and helped much to establish the hoodlum reign 
which was shortly inaugurated over the Avhole prison. ■ 

The Forty-Eighth New Yorkers who came in were a set of 

chaps so odd in every way as to be a source of never-failing 

interest. The name of tlieir regiment was LEnfants Perdu 

(the Lost Children), which we anglicized into " The Lost 

Ducks,'' It was believed that every nation in Europe was re[> 

resented in the'r ranks, and it used to be said jocularly, that no 

two of them spoke the same laniruage. As near as I couJd find 
11 



162 ANDERSONVILLE. 

out they were all or nearly all South Europeans, Italians, Span- 
iards, Portuguese, Levantmes, with a predominance of the 
French element. They wore a little cap with an upturned 
brim, and a strap resting on the chin, a coat with funny little 
tales about two inches long, and a brass chain across the breast ; 
and for pantaloons they had a sort of a petticoat reaching to 
the knees, and sewed together down the middle. They were 
just as singular otherwise as in their loote, speech and uniform. 
On one occasion the whole mob of us went over in a mass to 
their squad to see them cook and eat a large water snake, 
which two of them had succeeded in capturing in the swamps^ 
and carried off to their mess, jabbering in high glee over their 
treasure trove. Any of iis were ready to eat a piece of dog,, 
cat, horse or mule, if we could get it, but, it was generally 
agreed, as Dawson, of my company expressed it, that "^Nobody 
but one of them darned queer Lost Ducks would eat a varmint 
like a water snake.'' 

Major Albert Bogle, of the Eighth United States, (colored) 
had fallen into the hands of the llebels by reason of a severe 
wound in the leg, which left him helpless upon the field at 
Oolustee. The Rebels treated him with studied indignity. 
They utterly refused to recognize him as an officer, or even as 
a man. Instead of being sent to Macon or Columbia, where 
the other ofPicers were, he was sent to Andersonville, the samer 
as an enlisted man. l"lo care was given his wound, no surgeon 
would examine it or dress it. lie was thrown into a stock car, 
without a bed or blanket, and hauled over the rough, jolting 
road to Andersonville. Once a Rebel officer rode up and fired 
several shots at him, as he lay helpless on the car floor. For- 
tunately the Rebel's marksmanship was as bad as his in tentionsj. 
and none of the shots took effect. lie was placed in a squad 
near me, and compelled to get up and hobble into fine wljen 
the rest were mustered for roll-call. No opportunity to insult 
"the nigger officer," was neglected, and the ]\''Yaarkers vied 
with the Rebels in heaping abuse upon him. He was a fine^ 
intelligent young man, and bore it all with dignified self-pos- 
session, until after a lapse of some weeks the Rebels changed 
their pohcy and took him from the prison to send to where the? 
other officers were. 



A BTOBY OF EEBEL lULITAEY PfilSONS. 163 

The negro soldiers were also treated as badly as possibla 
The wounded were turned into the Stockade without havinor 
their hurts attended to. One stalwart, soldierly Sergeant had 
received a bullet which had forced its way under the scalp for 
some distance, and partially imbedded itself in the skull, where 
it still remained lie suffered intense agony, and would pass 
the whole night walking up and down the sti-eet in front of 
our tent, moaning distressingly. The bullet could be felt 
plainly with the fingers, and we were sure that it would not be 
a minute's work, with a sharp knife, to remove it and give the 
man relief. But we could not prevail upon the Eebel Surgeons 
even to see the man. Finally inflammation set in and he died. 

The negros were made into a squad by themselves, and taken 
out every day to work around the prison. A white Sergeant 
was placed over them, who was the object of the contumely of 
the guards and other Rebels. One day as he was standing nea.r 
the gate, waiting his orders to come out, the gate guard, with- 
out any provocation whatever, dropped his gun until the muzzlo 
rested against the Sergeant's stomach, and fired, killing him 
instantly. 

The Sergeantcy was then offered to me, but as I had no acci- 
dent policy, I was constrained to decline the honor. 



CHAPTER XXIY. 

&PRIL LOXGIXO TO GET OUT THE DEATH RATE THE PLAGtTB Ot 

LICE THE SO-CALLED nOSPITAL. 

April brought sunny skies and balmy weather. Existence 
became much more tolerable. AYith freedom it would have 
been enjoyable, even had we been no better fed, clothed and 
sheltered. But imprisomnent had never seemed so hard to 
bear — even in the first few weeks — as now. It was easier to 
submit to confinement to a limited area, when cold and rain 
were aiding hunger to benmnb the faculties and chill the ener- 
gies than it was now, when Nature was rousing her slumbering 
forces to activity, and earth, and air and sky were filled with 
stimulus to man to imitate her example. The yearning to be 
up and doing something — to turn these golden hours to good 
account for self and country — pressed into heart and brain as 
the vivifying sap pressed into tree-duct and plant ceU, awaking 
aU vegetation to energetic life. 

To be compelled, at such a time, to lie around in vacuous idle- 
ness — to spend days that should be crowded full of action in 
a monotonous, objectless routine of hunting bee, gatherins^ at 
roll-call, and drawing and cooking our scanty rations, was 
torturing. 

But to many of our number the aspirations for freedom- were 
not, as with us, the desire for a wider, manlier field of action, 
so much as an intense longing to get where care and comforts 
woukl arrest their swift progress to the shadowy hereafter. 
The cruel rains had sapped away then' stamina, and they could 
not recover it with the meager and innutritions diet of coarse 
meal, and an occasional scrap of salt meat. Quick consump- 
tion, bronclutis, pneumonia, low fever and diarrhea- seized upon 



A STOKT OF BEBEL MILITAKT PEIS0N8. 165 

these ready victims for their ravages, and bore them off at the 
rate of nearly a score a day. 

It now became a part of the day's re<^ular routine to take a 
walk past the gates in the morning, inspect and count the dead, 
and see if any friends were among them. Clothes having by this 
time become a very important consideration with the prisoners, 
it was the custom of the mess in which a man died to remove 
from his person all garments that were of any account, and so 
many bodies were carried out nearly naked. The hands were 
crossed upon the breast, the big toes tied together with a bit of 
string, and a slip of paper containing the man's name, rank, 
company and regiment was pinned on the breast of his shirt. 

The appearance of the dead was indescribably ghastly. The 
unclosed eyes shone with a stony glitter — 

An orphan's curse would drag to hell 

A spirit from on high : 
But, O, more terrible than that, 

Is the curse in a doad man's eye. 

The lips and nostrils were distorted with pain and hunger, the 
sallow, dirt-grimed skin drawn tensely over the facial bones, 
and the whole framed with the long, lank, matted hair and 
beard. Millions of lice swarmed over the wasted limbs and 
ridged ribs. These verminous pests had become so numerous 
— owing to our lack of changes of clothing, and of facilities for 
boiling what we had — that the most a healthy man could do 
was to keep the number feeding upon his person down to a 

reasonable limit — say a few table- 
spoonfuls. When a man became so 
sick as to be unable to help himself, 
the parasites speedily increased into 
millions, or, to speak more compre- 
hensively, into pints and quarts. It 
did not even seem exaggeration 
when some one declared that he had 
seen a dead man with more than a 
gallon of hce on him. 

There is no doubt that the irrita- 
tion from the biting of these myriads 
of insects abridged very materially the days of those who died. 




KHXINO LirB BT SINSEINa. 



166 ANDERSONVILLE. 

Where a sick man had friends or comrades, of course part of 
their duty, in taking care of him, was to " louse " his clothing. 
One of the most elfectual ways of doing this was to turn the 
garments wrong side out and hold the seams as close to the fire 
as possible, without burning the cloth. In a short time the lice 
would swell up and burst open, like pop-corn. This method 
was a favorite one for another reason than its efficacy : it gave 
one a keener sense of revenge upon his rascally little torment- 
ors than he could get in any other way. 

As the weather grew warmer and the number in the prison 
increased, the hce became more unendurable. They even filled 
the hot sand under our feet, and voracious troops would clim.b 
up on one like streams of ants swarming up a tree. We began 
to have a full comprehension of the third plague with which 
the Lord visited the Egyptians : 

And the Lord said unto Moses, Siiy nnto Aaron, Stretch out thy rod, and smite the dust of 
the land, that it may become lice through all the land of Egypt. 

And they did so ; for Aaron stretched out his hand with his rod, and emote the dnst of th« 
earth, and it became lice in man and in beast ; all the dust of the land became lice throughout 
all the land of Egypt. 

The total number of deaths in April, according to the official 
report, was five hundred and seventy-six, or an average of over 
nineteen a day. There was an average of five thousand pris- 
oners in the pen during aU but the last few da3^s of the month, 
when the number was increased by the arrival of the captured 
garrison of Ply mouth. This would make the loss over eleven 
per cent., and so worse ' than decimation. At that rate we 
should all have died in about eight months. We could have 
gone through a sharp campaign lasting those thirty days and 
not lost so great a proportion of our forces. The British had 
about as many men as were in the Stockade at the battle of 
New Orleans, yet their loss in killed fell much short of the 
deaths in tiie pen in April. 

A makeshift of a hospital was established in the northeastern 
corner of the Stockade. A portion of the ground was divided 
from the rest of the prison by a railing, a few tent flies were 
stretched, and in tliese the long leaves of the 2:>ine were made 
into apologies for beds of about the goodness of the straw on 
which a Northern farmer beds his stock. The sick taken there 
were no better off than if they had staid with their comrades. 



A S'l'OKV OF KKBJ!;L MlLITAliY I'KISONS. 167 

What they needed to bring about their recovery was 
«lean clothing, nutritious food, shelter and freedom from the 
tortures of the lice. They obtained none of these. Save a 
few decoctions of roots, there were no medicines ; the sick 
'.vero fed the same coarse corn meal that brouglit about the 
malignant dysentery from which they all suffered ; they wore 
and slept in the same vermin-infested clothes, and there could 
be but one result : the official records show that seventy-six 
per cent, of those taken to the hospitals died there. 

The establishment of the hospital was specially unfortunate 
for my little squad. The ground required for it compelled a 
general reduction of the space we all occupied. We had to 
tear down our huts and move. By this time the materials had 
become so dry that we could not rebuild with them, as the pine 
tufts fell to pieces. This reduced the tent and bedding material 
of our party — now numbering five — to a cavalry overcoat 
and a blanket. We scooped a hole a foot deep in the sand and 
stuck our tent-poles around it. By day we spread our blanket 
over the poles for a tent. At night we lay down upon the 
overcoat and covered ourselves with the blanlcet. It required 
considerable stretching to make it go over five ; the two out- 
side fellows used to get very chilly, and squeeze the three 
inside ones until they felt no thicker than a wafer. But it had 
to do, and we took turns sleeping on the outside. In the 
course of a few weeks three of my chums died and left myself 
aiid B. B. Andrews (now Dr. Andrews, of Astoria, IIL) sol© 
heu's to and occupants of, the overcoat and blanket. 







8TEiri'I>:'> TUK DEAD FOR CLOTHES. 



CHAPTER XXV. 

THE " PLTMOUTH PILGRIMS " SAD TRANSITION FROM COMFORTABLE 

BARRACKS TO ANDERSONVILLE A CRAZED PENNSYLVANIAN 

DEVELOPMENT OF 1UE SUTLER BUSINESS. 

"We awoke one morning, in the last part of April, to find 
about two thousand freshly arrived prisoners lying asleep in 
the main streets running from the gates. They were attired in 
stylisli new uniforms, Avith fancy hats and shoes ; tlie Sergeants 
and Corporals wore patent leather or silk chevrons, and each 
man had a large, well -filled knapsack, of the kind new recruits 
usually carried on coming first to the front, and which the 
older soldiers spoke of humorously as "bureaus." They were 
the snuggest, nattiest lot of soldiers we had ever seen, outside 
of the " paper collar " fellows forming the headquarter guard 
of some General in a large City. As one of my companions 
surveyed them, he said : 

" llulloa ! I'm blanked if the Johnnies haven't caught a reg- 
iment of Brigadier Generals, somewhere." 

Ey-and-by the " fresh fish," as all new arrivals were termed, 
began to wake up, and then we learned that they belonged to 
a brigade consisting of the Eighty-Fifth Xe^v York, One llun- 
dred and First and One Hundred and Third Pensylvania, Six. 
teenth Connecticut, Twenty-Fourth I\ew York Battery, two 
companies of Massachusetts heavy artillery, and a company oi 
the Twelfth Xew York Cavalry. 

They had been garrisoning Plymouth, N. C, an important 
seaport on tlic Iloanoke Piver. Three small gunboats assisted 
them m their duty. The Pebels constructed a powerful iron 
clad called the " Albemarle," at a point further up the Roanoke, 
and on the afternoon of the 17th, with her and tkree brig* 



A STORY OF REBEL MULITAIiY PRISONS. 



16& 



ades of infantry, made an attack upon the post. The " Albe- 
marle " ran past the forts unharmed, sank one of the gunboats, 
and drove the others away. She then turned her attention to 
the garrison, which she took in the rear, while the infantry 
attacked in front. Our men held out until the 20th, when they 
capitulated. They were allowed to retain their personal effects,. 
of all kinds, and, as is the case with all men in garrison, these 
were considerable. 

The One Hundred and First and One Hundred and Third 
Pennsylvania and Eighty-Fifth New York had just " veteran- 
ized," and received their first instalment of veteran bounty. 
Had they not beeu attacked they would have sailed for home- 
,.v^-^ in a day or two, on their ^•eteran fur- 

lough, and this accounted for their fine 
raiment. They were made up of boys 
from good New York and Pennsyl- 
vania families, and were, as a rule, 
intelligent and fairly educated. 

Theu- horror at the, appearance of their- 
place of incarceration was beyond ex- 
pression. At one moment they could 
not comprehend that we dirty and bog- 
gard tatterdemalions liad once been 
clean, self-respecting, well-fed soldiers 
Hke themselves ; at the next they would 
affirm that they knew they could not 
stand it a month, where we had then 
endured it from four to niiie months. 
They took it, in every way, the hardest 
of any prisoners that came in, except 
some of the Hundred-Days' men, who. 
were brought in in August, from the 
Yalloy of Yirginia. They had served 
nearly all their time in various garrisons 
along the seacoast — from Fortress Monroe to Peauf ort — where 
they had had comparatively little of the actual hardships of soL 
diering in the field. They had nearly always had comfortable 
quarters, an abundance of food, few hard marches or other 
severe service. Consequently they were not so well hardened 
for Andersonyille as the majority who came in. In other 




A PLYMOUTH PILGKIM. 



U70 AJSDEliSONVlLLE. 

respects tlicy Vv-eve better prepared, as they had an abundance 
of clothing, blankets and cooking utensils, and each man had 
•some of his veteran bounty still in possession. 

It was painful to see how rapidly many of them sank under 
the miseries of tlie situation. They gave up the moment the 
,gates were closed upon them, and began pining away. We 
older prisoners buoyed ourselves up continually witli hopes of 
escape or exchange. We dug tunnels with the persistence of 
beavers, and we watched every possible opportunity to get out- 
side the accursed walls of the pen. But we could not enlist the 
interest of these discouraged ones in any of our schemes, or 
talk. Tliey resigned themselves to Death, and waited despond- 
dngly till he came. 

A middle-aged One Hundred and First Pennsylvanian, who 
had taken up his quarters near me, was an object of peculiar 
interest. lieasonably intelligent and fairly read, I presume 
that he was a res]iectable mechanic before entering the Army. 
lie w^as evidently a very domestic man, whose w^hole happiness 
centered in bis family. 

When lie tii-st came in he was thoroughly dazed by the greav 
aess of his misfortune. lie would sit for hours with his facb 
in his hands and his elbows on his knees, gazing out u})on the 
mass of men and huts, with vacant, lack-luster eyes. We 
■could not interest him in an3^thing. We tried to show him 
how to fix his blanket up to give him some shelter, but he went 
at the work in a disheartened way, and finally smiled feebly 

and stopped. He had some letters 
from his family and a melaineotype 
"^ '^ of a plain-faced woman — his wife 

— and her children, and spent much 
time in looking at them. At first 
he ate his rations when he drev/ 
them, but finally began to rejecl. 
them. In a few days he was deU- 
%-J-^ ~Sj rious with hunger and homesicJtr- 

' '''^- . < ^r^;^ -.55^-^- ;^i- ness. He would sit on the sana 

for hours imagining that he was at 

TUE CKA^T PEN^STXVAXIAX. ^^^ f^^jj^ ^^^^^ dispCDSin^ JliS 

frugal hospitalities to his wife and children. 




A STOET OF KEBEL anLTTARY PKIS0N8. 171 

Making a motion, as if presenting a dish, he would say: 

" Janie, have another biscuit, do ! " 

Or, 

" Eddie, son, won't you have another piec(^ of this nice 
steak ? " 

Or, 

" Maggie, have some more potatos," and so on, through a 
whole family of six, or more. It was a relief to us when he 
died in about a month after he came in. 

As stated above, the Plymouth men brought in a large 
amount of money — variously estimated at from ten thousand 
to one hundred thousand dollars. The presence of this quan- 
tity of circulating medium immediately started a lively com- 
merce All sorts of devices were resorted to b}'' the other pris- 
oners to get a little of this wealth. Rude chuck-a-luck boards 
were constructed out of such material as vras attainable, and 
put in operation. Dice and cards were brouglit out by those 
skilled in such matters. As those of us already in the Stock- 
ade occupied all the ground, there was no disposition on the 
part of many to surrender a portion of their space without 
exacting a pecuniary compensation. Messes having ground in 
a good location would frequentl}^ demand and get ten dollars for 
permission for two or three to quarter with them. Tlien there 
was a great demand for poles to stretch blankets over to make 
tents; the Hebels, with their usual stupid cruelty, would not 
supply these, nor allow the prisoners to go out and get them 
themselves. Many of the older prisoners had poles to spare 
which they were saving up for fuel. They sold these to the 
Plymouth folks at the rate of ten dollars for three — enough 
to put up a blanket. 

The most considerable trading was done throujih the irates. 
The Pebel guards were found quite as keen to bai-ter as they 
had been in Richmond. Though the laws against their dealing 
in the money of the enemy were still as stringent as ever, their 
thirst for greenbacks was not abated one whit, and they were 
ready to sell anj^thing they had for the coveted currency. The 
rate of exchange was seven or eight dollars in Confederate 
money for one dollar in greenbacks. "Wood, tobacco, meat, 
flour, beans, molasses, onions and a villainous kind of whisky. 



172 



AJSTDERSONVILLE. 



made from sorghum, were the staple articles of trade. A whole 
race of little traffickers in these articles sprang up, and finally 
Selden, the Eebel Quartermaster, established a sutler shop in 
the center of the North Side, which he put in charge of Ira 
Beverly, of the One Hundredth Ohio, and Charlie Iluckleby, 




MIDNTGnT ATTACK OF THE RAIDERS. 



of the Eighth Tennessee, It was a fine illustration of the 
development of the commercial instinct in some men. No 
more (unlikely place for making money could be imagined, 
yet starting in without a cent, they contrived to turn and 
twist and trade, until they had transferred to their pockets 
a portion of the funds which were in some one else's. 
The Kebels, of course, got nine out of every ten dollars there 
was in the prison, but these middle men contriv^ed to have a little 
of it stick to their fingers. 

It was only the very few who were able to do this. Nine 
hundred and ninety-nine out of every thousand were, like my- 



A 8T0KY OF BEBEL MILITAEY PRISONS. 173 

self, either wholly destitute of money and unable to get it from 
anybody else, or they paid out what money tliey had to the 
middlemen, in exorbitant prices for articles of food. 

The N'Taarkers had still another method for getting food, 
money, blankets and clothing. They formed little bands 
called " Eaiders," under the leadership of a chief villain. One 
of these bands would select as their yictim a man who had 
good blankets, clothes, a watch, or greenbacks. Frequently he 
would be one of the httle traders, with a sack of beans, a piece 
of meat, or something of that kind. Pouncing upon him at 
night they would snatch away his possessions, knock down his 
friends who came to his assistance, and scurry away into the 
darkness. 



CHAPTER XXV] 

LONGINGS FOR GOd's COrrNTRY CONSTTtERATKinS OF THE MT5TH0DS 

OF GE'rriNG THERE EXCHANGE AND ESCAPE DIGGING TUN- 
NELS, AND THE DIFFICULTIES CONNECTED TUEREWITU PUNISH- 
MENT OF A TRAITOR. 

To our minds the world now contained but two grand 
divisions, as widely different from each other as happiness and 
miser}'-. The first — that portion over which our flag floated — 
was usually spoken of as " God's Country ;" the other — that 
under the baneful shadow of the banner of rebellion — was 
designated by the most opprobrious epithets at the speaker's 
command. 

To get from the latter to the former was to attain, at one 
bound, the highest good. Better to be a doorkeeper in the 
House of the Lord, under the Stars and Stripes, than to dwel^ 
in the tents of wickedness, under the hateful Southern Cross. 

To take even the humblest and hardest of service m the field 
now would be a delightsome change. We did not ask to go 
home — we would be content with anj'^thing, so long as it was 
in that blest place — " within our Imes." Only let us get back 
once, and there vv'ould be no more grumbling at rations or 
guard duty — we would willingly endm'e all the hardships and 
privations that soldier flesh is heir to. 

There were two ways of getting back — escape and exchange. 
Exchange was like the ever receding mk-age of the desert, that 
lures the thirsty traveler on over the parched sands, with illu- 
sions of refreshing s]«'ings, only to leave his bones at last to 
whiten by the side of tliose of his unremembcred predecessors. 
Every day there came something to build up the hopes that ex- 



A STORY OF EEBEL MTLITAJET PKISOXS. 17*' 

change was near at hand — everv day bronglit something to- 
extinguish the hopes of the preceding one. AVe took these 
varying phases according to our several temperaments. The- 
sanguiiie built themselves up on the encouraging reports; the 
desponding sank down and died under the discouraging ones. 

Escape was a perpetual allurement. To the actively inclined 
among us it seemed always possible, and daring, bus}'' brains, 
were indefatigable in concocting schemes for it. - The only bit 
of Rebel brain, work that I ever saw for which I did not feel 
contempt was the perfect precautions taken to prevent our 
escape. This is shown by the fact that, although, from first to- 
last, there were nearly fifty thousand prisoners in Anderson- 
ville, and three out of every five of these were ever on the- 
alert to take French leave of their captors, only three hundred 
and twenty-eight succeeded in getting so far away from Ander- 
sonville as to leave it to be presumed that they had reached 
our fines. 

The first, and almost superhuman difficulty was to get out- 
side the Stockade. It was simply impossible to scale it. The- 
guards were too close together to allow an instant's hope to 
the most sanguine, tliat he could even pass the Dead Line with- 
out being shot by some one of them. This same closeness pre- 
vented any hope of bribing them. To be successful half those 
on post would have to be bribed, as every part of the Stockade 
was clearly visible from every other part, and there was no- 
night so dark as not to allow a plain view to a number of 
guards of the dark figure outlined against the liglit colored 
logs of any Yankee who should essay to clamber towards the 
top of the palisades. 

The gates were so carefully guarded every time they were 
opened as to preclude hope of slipping out through them. 
They were only unclosed twice or thrice a day — once to admit 
the men to call the roll, once to let them out again, once to let 
the wagons come in with rations, and once, perhaps, to admit, 
new prisoners. At all these times every precaution was taken 
to prevent any one getting out surreptitiously. 

This narrowed down the possibilities of passmg the limits of 
the pen alive, to tunneling. This was also surrounded by 
almost insuperable difficulties. First, it required not less thanv 



£76 



AlfDEKSOirrrLLE. 



fifty feei of subtorranoan excavation to get out, wliicli was an 
enormous work with our limited means. Then the logs forming 
the Stockade were set in the ground to a depth of five feet, and 
the tunnel had to go down beneath them. They had an un- 
pleasant habit of dropping down into the burrow under them. 
It added much to the discouragements of tunneling to think of 
one of these massive timbers dropping upon a fellow as he 
worlccd his mole-lilce way under it, and either crusiiing him to 
death outright, or pinning him there to die of suirocatiou or 
tiunrrer, 

O 

In one instance, in a tunnel near me, but in wliich I was not 
interested, the log slipped down after the digger had got out 
beyond it. lie immediately began digging for the surface, for 
life, and was fortunately able to break through before he suf- 
focated, lie got his head above the ground, and then fainted. 

The guard outside saw him, pulled 
him out of the hole, and when he 
recovered sensibility hurried him 
back into the Stockatle. 

In another tunnel, also near us, 
a broad-shouldered German, of 
the Second Minnesota, went in 
to take his turn at digging. He 
was so much larger than any of 
his predecessors that he stuck 
fast in a narrow part, and despite 
all the efforts of himself and 
comrades, it was found impossi- 
ble to move him one way or the other. The comrades were at 
last reduced to the humdiation of informing the Oilicer of the 
Guard of their tunnel and the condition of their friend, and 
of asking assistance to release him, which was given. 

The great tunneling tool was the indispensable half-canteen. 
The inventive genius of our people, stimulated by the war, 
pi-oduced nothing for the comfort and effectiveness of the 
soUlieJ' e(|ual in usefulness to this humble and unrecognized 
utensil. It wiU be remembered that a canteen vras composed 
of two pieces of tin struck up into the shape of saucers, and 
Sijldered to;j:ether at the edo^es. After a soldier had been in 




IGNOJimiOUS END OP A TUNNEL 
ENTEUrRISE. 



A STOKY OF REBEL MILITARY PRISONS. 177 

the field a little while, and thrown away or lost the curious and 
complicated kitchen furniture he started out with, he found 
that by melting the halves of his canteen apart, he had a vessel 
much handier in every way than any he had parted with. It 
could be used for anything — to make soup or coffee in, bake 
bread, brown coffee, stew vegetables, etc., etc. A sufficient 
handle was made with a split stick. When the cooking was 
done, the handle was thrown away, and the half canteen slipped 
out of the road into the haversack. There seemed to be no 
end of the uses to which this ever-read}^ disk of blackened sheet 
iron could be turned. Several instances are on record where 
infantry regiments, Avith no other tools than this, covered 
themselves on the field with quite respectable rifle pits. 

The starting point of a tunnel was always some tent close 
to the Dead Line, and sufficiently well closed to screen the 
operations from the sight of the guards near by. The party 
engaged in the work organized by giving every man a number 

to secure the proper 
apportionment of the 
labor. JSTumber One 
began digging with his 
half canteen. After he 
had worked until tired, 
he came out, and JSTum- 
ber Two took his place, 
and so on. The tunnel 
^^-^ST jJS'^x^, . -- "^as simply a round, 

''Mi/A^^^^/'///'//7yM > // '//-''■'/^^^^^ rat-like burrow, a little 

larger than a man's 
body. The digger lay on his stomach, dug ahead of him, threw the 
dirt under him, and worked it back with his feet till the man 
behind him, also lying on his stomach, could catch it and work it 
back to the next. As the tunnel lengthened the number of men 
behind each other in this way had to be increased, so that in a 
tunnel seventy-five feet long there would be from eio-ht to ten 
men lying one behind the other. When the dirt was pushed 
back to the mouth of the tunnel it was taken up in improvised 
bags, made by tying up the bottoms of pantaloon legs, carried to 
th6 Swamp, and emptied. The work in the tunnel was very 
12 




178 AITOERSONVILLE. 

« 

j 

exhausting, and the digger had to be relieved every half- 
hour. 

The greatest trouble was to carry the tunnel forward in a 
straight line. As nearly everybody dug most of the time "^vith i 
the right hand, there was an almost irresistible tendency tO' I 
make the course veer to the left. The first tunnel I was con- | 
nected with was a ludicrous illustration of this. About twenty i 
of us had devoted our nights for over a week to the prolongar [ 
tion of a burrow. We had not yet reached the Stockade, wliich - 
astonished us, as measurement with a string showed that we- 
had gone nearly twice the distance necessary for the purpose. : 
The thing was inexplicable, and we ceased operations to con- ' 
sider tlie matter. The next day a man walking by a tent some- : 
little distance from the one in which the hole began, was badly ; 
startled by the ground giving way under his feet, and his sink- ; 
ing nearly to his waist in a hole. It was very singular, but \ 
after wondering over tlie matter for some hours, there came a '> 
glimmer of suspicion that it might be, in some way, connected ■ 
with the missing end of our tunnel. One of us started through [ 
on an exploring expedition, and con'^rjned the suspicions by j 
coraino; out where the man had broken throuii'li. Our tunnel 
was shaped like a horse shoe, and the beginning and end were- * 
not fifteen feet apart. After that we practised digging with { 
our left hand, and made certain compensations for the tendency j 
to the sinister side. j 

Another trouble connected with tunneling was the number | 
of traitors and spies among us. There were many — princi- ;■ 
pally among the N'Yaarker crowd — who were always zealous- 
to betray a tunnel, in order to curry favor with the Eebel 
officers. Then, again, the Rebels had numbers of their own ;^ 
men in the pen at night, as spies. It was hardly even necessary | 
to dress these in our uniform, because a great many of our own-*'^ 
men came into the prison in Kebel clothes, having been com- i 
pellcd to trade garments with their captors. I 

One day in May, quite an excitement was raised by the \ 
detection of one of these " tunnel traitors " in such a way as- ; 
left no doubt of his guilt. At first everybody was in favor of 'j 
killing him, and they actually started to beat him to death, i 
This was arrested by a proposition to "have Captain Jack j 



A STORY OF KEBEL MILITAET PRISONS. 



179 



tattoo him," 'and the suggestion was immediately acted 
upon. 

" Captain Jack " was a sailor who had been with us in the Pem- 
berton building at Richmond. lie was a very sldlf ul tattoo 
artist, but, I am sure, could make the process nastier than any 
other that I ever saw attempt it. lie chewed tobacco enor- 
mously. After pricking away for a few minutes at the design 
on the arm or some portion of the body, he would deluge it 
with a flood of tobacco spit, which, he claimed, acted as a kind 
of mordant. Wiping this off with a filthy rag, he would study 
the effect for an instant, and then go ahead with another series 
of prickings and tobacco juice drenchings. 

The tunnel-traitor was taken to Captain Jack. That worthy 
decided to brand him with a great " T," the top part to extend 
across his forehead and the stem to run down his nose. Cap- 
tain Jack got his tattooing kit read}'', and the feUow was 




^afW' 



TATTOOmO THE TUNNEL TRAITOR. 

thrown upon the ground and held there. The Captain took 
his head betAveen his legs, and began operations. After an 
instant's work with the needles, he opened his mouth, and 
filled the wretch's face and eyes full of the disgusting saliva. 
The crowd round about yelled with delight at this new process. 
For an hour, that was doubtless an eternity to the rascal under- 
going brandhig, Captain Jack contmued his alternate pick- 
ings and drenchings. At the end of that time the traitor's face 



180 AJ^DEESONVILLE. 

was disfigured -with a hideous mark that he would bear to his 
grave. We learned afterwards that he was not one of our men, 
but a Eebel spy. This added much to our satisfaction with the 
manner of his treatment. He disappeared shortly after the 
operation was finished, being, I suppose, taken outside. I 
hardly think Captain Jack would be pleased to meet him again. 



CHAPTER XXVn. 

THB HOUNDS, AlTD THE DIFFICULTIES THEY PUT IN THB WAT OT 
ESCAPE THE WHOLE SOUTH PATROLLED BY THEM. 

Those ttIio succeeded, one way or another, in passing the 
Stockade limits, found still more difficulties lying between them 
and freedom than would discourage ordinarily resolute men. 
The first Avas to get away from the immediate vicinity of the 
prison. All around were Eebel patrols, pickets and guards, 
watching every avenue of egress. Several packs of hounds 
formed efficient coadjutors of these, and were more dreaded by 
possible " escapes," than any other means at the command of 
our jailors. Guards and patrols could be evaded, or circum- 
vented, but the hounds could not. Nearly every man brought 
back from a futile attempt at escape told the same story : he 
had been able to escaj)e the human Ilebels, but not their canine 
colleagues. Three of our detachment — members of the Twen- 
tieth Indiana — had an experience of this kind that will serve 
to illustrate hundreds of others. They had been taken outside 
to do some work upon the cook-house that was being built. A 
guard was sent with the three a little distance into the Avoods 
to get a piece of timber. The boys sauntered along carelessly 
with the guard, and ma,naged to get pretty near him. As soon 
as they were fairly out of sight of the rest, the strongest of 
them — Tom Williams — snatched the liebers gun away from 
him, and the other two springing upon hun as swift as wild 
cats, throttled him, so that he could not give the alarm. Still 
keeping a hand on his throat, they led him off some distance, 
and tied him to a sapling with strings made by tearing up one 
of theu' blouses. lie Avas also securely gagged, and the boys, 



182 



ANDEESONVILLE. 



bidding liim a hasty, but not specially tender, farewell, strnck 
out, as they fondly hoped, for freedom. It was not long until 
they were missed, and the parties sent in search found and re- 
leased the guard, who gave all the information he possessed as 




OVERPOWEIiING A GUAED. 

to what had become of his charges. All the packs of hounds, \ 
the squads of cavalry, and the foot patrols were sent out to ■ 
scour the adjacent country. The Yanlvees kept in the swamps 
and creeks, and no trace of them was found that afternoon or ' 
evening. By this time they were ten or fifteen miles away, < 
and thought that they could safely leave the creeks for better i 
walking on the solid ground. They had gone but a few miles, ' 
when the pack of hounds Captain Wirz was with took their 
trail, and came after them in full cry. The boys tried to run, ■ 
but, exhausted as they \vere, the}^ could make no headway. : 
Two of them were soon caught, but Tom Williams, who was 
so desperate that he preferred death to recapture, jumped into \ 
a mill-pond near by. "When he came up, it was in a lot of \ 



saw logs and drift wood that hid him from being seen from 
the shore. The dogs stopped at the shore, and ba3'ed after the 
disappearing prey. The Rebels with them, who had seen Tom 
spring in, came up and made a pretty thorough search for him. 
As they did not think to pi'obe around the drift wood this 
was unsuccessful, and they came to the conclusion that Tom 
had been drowned. Wirz marched the other two back and, for 
a wonder, did not punish them, probably because he was so 
rejoiced at his success in capturing them, lie was beaming 
with delight when he returned them to our squad, and said, 
with a chuckle : — 

" Brisoners, I pring you pack two of dem tarn Yankees wat 
^ot away yesterday, uut I run de oder raskal into a mill-pont 
and trowntet him." 

"What was our astonishment, about three weeks later, to see 
Tom, fat and healthy, and dressed in a full suit of butternut, 
•come stalking into the pen. lie had nearly reached the 
mountains, when a pack of hounds, patrolling for deserters or 
negros, took his trail, where he had crossed tlie road from one 
field to another, and speedily ran him down. He had been put 
in a little country jail, and well fed till an opportunity occurred 
to send him back. This patrolling for negros and deserters 
was another of tiie great obstacles to a successful passage 
through the country. The Rebels had put every able-bodied 
white man in the ranks, and were bending every energy to keep 
him there. The wiiole country was caref uUy policed by Provost 
Marshals to bring out those who were shirking military duty, 
or had deserted their coloi's, and to check any movement by 
the negros. One could not go anywhere without a pass, as 
every road was continually watched by men and hounds. It 
was the policy of our men, when escaping, to avoid roads as 
much as possible b}"" traveling through the woods and fields. 

From what I saw of the hounds, and what I could learn from 
■others, I believe that each pack was made up of two blood- 
hounds and from twenty-five to fifty other dogs. The blood- 
ihounds were debased descendants of the strong and fierce 
hounds imported from Cuba — many of them by the United 
States Government — for hunting Indians, during the Seminole 
war. The other dogs were the mongrels that are found in 



184 AJTOEESONVLLLE. 

such plentifulness about every Southern house — increasing, as 
a rule, in numbers as the inhabitant of the house is lower down 
and poorer. They are like wolves, sneaking and cowardly 
when alone, fierce and bold Avhcn in packs. Each pack was 




^^. 




A MASTER OF THE IIOUXDS. 

managed by a well-armed man, Avho rode a mule, and carried, 
slung over his shoulders by a cord, a cow horn, scraped very 
thin, with which he controlled the band by signals. 

"What always puzzled me much was why the hounds took 
only Yankee trails, in the vicinity of the prison. There was- 
about the Stockade from six thousand to ten thousand Rebels 
and negros, including guards, officers, servants, workmen, etc. 
These were, of course, continually in motion and must have 
daily made trails leading in every direction. It was the cus- 
tom of the Eebels to send a pack of hounds around the prison 
every morning, to examine if any Yankees had escaped during 
the niglit. It was believed that they rarely failed to find a 
prisoner's tracks, and still more rarely ran off upon a Rebel's. 
If those outside the Stockade had been confined to certain paths 



A STOET OF KEBEL MILITARY PKIS0N3. 



185 



and roads we could have understood this, but, as I understand, 
they were not. It was part of the interest of the day, for us, 
to watch the packs go yelping around the pen searching for 
tracks. We got information in this way whether any tunnels 
had been successfully opened during the night. 




nOUNDS TEARING A PEISOXEE. 



The use of hounds furnished us a crushing reply to the eveiv 
recurring Rebel question : 

" AVhy are you-uns puttin' niggers in the field to fight we-uns 
for ? " 

The questioner was alwa\^s silenced b}'- the return interrog- 
atory : 

" Is that as bad as running white men down with blood 
hounds ? " 



CHAPTER XXYIIL 

■MAY IXB'LUX OF NEW PRISON KR3 DISPARITT IN KOrBEKS 

BETWEEN THE EASTERN AND WESTERN ARMIES TERKIULE 

CROWDING SLAUGHTER OF MEN AT THE CREEK. 

In May the long gathering storm of war burst with angry 
violence all along the line licit! b}^ the contending armies. The 
campaign began which was to terminate eleven months later 
in the obliteration of the Southern Confederacy. May 1, 
Sigel moved up the Shenandoah Valley with thirty thousand 
men ; May 3, Butler began his blundering movement against 
Petersburg ; May 3, the Army of the Potomac left Cul]->eper, 
and on the 5th began its deadly gra]i])le with Lee, in the Wil- 
derness ; May 6, Sherman moved from Chattanooga, and 
engaged Joe Johnston at Pocky Face Pidge and Tunnel nill. 

Each of these columns lost heavily in prisoners. It could not 
be otherwise ; it Avas a consequence of the aggressive move- 
ments. An army acting offensively usually suffers more from 
capture than one on the defensive. Our armies were })enetrat- 
iug the enemy's country in close proximity to a determined and 
vigilant foe. Every scout, every skirmish line, every picket, 
every foraging paity ran the risk of falling into a Pebel trap. 
This was in addition to the risk of capture in action. 

The bullc of the prisoners were taken from the Army of the 
Potomac. For this there were two reasons : First, that there 
were many more men in that Army than in any other ; and 
second, that the entanglement in the dense thickets and shrub- 
'bery of the Wilderness enabled both sides to capture great 
numbers of the other's men. Grant lost in prisoners from May 
5 to May 31, seven thousand four hundred and fifty ; he prob- 
ably captured two-thirds of that number from the Johnnies. 



A 8T0KT OF liEBEL ]iIILITARY PKISON8. 187 

"Wirz's headquarters were established in a large log house 
which had been built in the fort a littie distant from the south- 
east corner of the prison. Every day — and sometimes twice 
or thrice a day — we would see great squads of prisoners 
marched up to these headquarters, where they would be 
searched, their names entered upon the prison records, by 
■clerlvs (detailed prisoners ; few Eebels had the requisite clerical 
sldll) and then ])e marched into the prison. As they entered, the 
Rebel guards would stand to arms. The inf antrj" would be in 
line of battle, the cavalry mounted, and the artillerymen standing 
by their guns, ready to open at the instant with gra2:)e and can- 
ister. 

The disparity between the number coming in from the Army 
of the Potomac and Western armies was so great, that we 
"Westerners began to take some advantage of it. If we saw a 
squad of one hundred and fifty or thereabouts at the head- 
quarters, we felt pretty certain they were from Sherman, and 
gathered to meet them, and learn the news from our friends. 
If there were from five hundred to two thousand we knew they 
were from the Army of the Potomac, and there were none of 
our comrades among them. There Avere three exceptions to 
this rule while we were in Andersonville. The first was in 
June, when the drunken and incompetent Sturgis (now Colonel 
of the Seventh United States Cavalry) shamefully sacrificed a 
superb division at Guntown, Miss. The next was after Ilood 
made his desperate attack on Sherman, on the 22d of July, and 
the third was when Stoneman was captured at Macon. At 
■each of these times about two thousand prisoners were 
brought in. 

By the end of May there were eighteen thousand four hun- 
dred and fifty-four prisoners in. the Stockade. Before the 
reader dismisses this statement from his mind let him reflect 
how great a number this is. It is more active, able-bodied 
young men than there are in any of our leading Cities, save 
New York and Philadelphia. It is more than the average 
population of an Ohio County. It is four times as many troops 
as Taylor won the victory of Buena Vista with, and about 
twice as many as Scott went into battle with at any time in his 
march to the City of Mexico. 



188 AlfDERSONYILLB. 

These eighteen thousand four hundred and fifty-four men 
were cooped up on less than thirteen acres of ground, making 
about fifteen hundred to the acre. ISTo room could be given up 
for streets, or for the usual arrangements of a camp, and most 
] kinds of exercise were wholly precluded. The men crowded 
l„^ether like pigs nesting in the woods on cold nights. The 
ground, despite all our efforts, became indescribably filthy, and 
this condition grew rapidly worse as the season advanced and 
the sun's rays gained fervency. As it is impossible to describe 
this adequately, I must again ask the reader to assist with a 
few comparisons. lie has an idea of how much filth is pro- 
duced, on an ordinary City lot, in a week, by its occupation by 
a family say of six persons. 'Now let" him imagine what would 
be tlie result if that lot, instead of having upon it six persons, 
with every appliance for keeping themselves clean, and for 
removing and concealing filth, was the home of one hundred 
and eight men, with none of these appliances. 

That he may figure out these proportions for himself, I will 
repeat some of the elements of the problem : "\7e will say that 
an average City lot is thirty feet front by one hundred deep. 
This is more front than most of them have, but we will be 
hberal. This gives us a surface of three thousand square feet. 
An acre contains forty-three thousand five hundred and sixty 
square feet. Upon thu'teen of these acres, we had eighteen 
thousand four hundred and fifty-four men. After he has found 
the number of square feet that each man had for sleeping 
apartment, dining room, kitchen, exercise grounds and out- 
houses, and decided that nobody could live for any length of 
J4p^^ i^ ^^^^ contracted space, I will tell him that a few weeks 

I later double that many men were crowded u]3on that sj)ace — 

1 that over thirty-five thousantl were packed upon those twelve 

\ and a-half or thirteen acres. 

l^^^'^^wi I will not anticipate. With the warm weatlier the con- 
dition of the swamp m the center of tlie prison became simply 
horrible. We hear so much now-a-days of blood poisoning 
from the effluvia of sinks and sewers, that reading it, I wonder 

^ how a man inside the Stockade, and into whose nostrils came a 
breath of that noisomeness, escaped being carried off by a 
mahgnant typhus. In the sMm}^ ooze were billions of white 



A STORY OF REBEL MILITARY PRISONS. 



189 



maggots. They would crawl out by thousands on the warm 
sand, and, lying there a few minutes, sprout a wing or a pair 
of them, With these they would essay a clumsy flight, ending 
by dropping down upon some exposed portion of a man's body, 
and stinging him like a gad-fly. Still worse, they would drop 
into what he was cooking, and the utmost care could not pre- 
vent a mess of food from being contaminated with them. 

All the water that we had to use was that in the creek which 
flowed through this seething mass of corruption, and received 
its sewerage. How pm-e the water was when it came into the 



:\ 




SHOT AT THE CREEK BY THE GUARD. 



Stockade was a question. We always believed that it received 
the drainage from the camj3s of the guards, a half-a-mile away. 
A road was made across the swamp, along the Dead Line at 
the west side, where the creek entered the pen. Those getting 
water would go to this spot, and reach as far up the stream |^s 
possible, to get the water that was least filthy. As they could 



190 A2TDEES0NVILLE. 

reach nearly to the Dead Line this furnished an excuse to such 
of the guards as vrere murderously inclined to fire upon them. 
I think I hazard nothing in saying that for weeks at least one 
man a day was killed at this place. The murders became- 
monotonous ; there was a dreadful sameness to them. A gun 
would crack ; looking up we would see, still smoking, the muz- 
zle of the musket of one of the guards ou cither side of the- 
creek. At the same instant would rise a piercing shriek from 
the man struck, now floundering in the creek in his death 
agony. Then thousands of throats Avould yell out curses and 
denunciations, and — 

" O, give the Rebel a f urlougli ! " 

It was our belief that every guard \vho killed a Yankee was- 
rewarded with a thirty-day furlough. Mr. Frederick Ilolliger, 
now of Toledo, formerly a member of the Seventy-Second 
Ohio, and captured at Guntown, tells me, as his introduction to- 
Andersonville life, that a few hours after his entry he went ta 
the brook to get a drink, reached out too far, and was fired 
upon by the guard, who missed him, but killed another man 
and wounded a second. The other prisoners standing near 
then attacked him, and beat him nearly to death, for having 
draAvn the fire of the guard. 

Nothing could be more inexcusable than these murders. 
Whatever defense there might be for firing on men who- 
touched the Dead Line in other parts of the prison, there could 
be none here. The men had no intention of escaping ; they 
had no designs upon the Stockade ; they were not leading any 
^arty to assail it. They were in every instance killed in the 
act of reaching out with their cups to dip up a little water. 



CHAPTER XXIX. 

SOME DISTINCTION BETWEEN SOLDIEKLT DUTY AND MURDER Jb 

PLOT TO ESCAPE IT IS REVEALED AND FRUSTRATED. 

Let the reader understand that in any strictures I make I do- 
not complain of the necessary hardships of war, I understood 
fully and accepted the conditions of a soldier's career. My 
going into the field uniformed and armed implied an intention,, 
at least, of Ivilling, wounding, or capturing, some of the enemy. 
There was consequently no ground of complaint if I was 
myself killed, wounded, or captured. If I did not want to 
take these chances I ought to stay at home. In the same way, 
I recognized the right of our captors or g-uards to take proper 
precautions to prevent our escape. I never questioned for an 
instant the right of a guard to fire upon those attempting to- 
escape, and to kill them. Had I been posted over prisoners I 
should have had no compunction about shooting at those trying 
to get away, and consequently I could not blame the Eebels 
for doing the same thing. It was a matter of soldierly duty. 

But not one of the men assassinated by the guards at Ander- 
sonviUe were trying to escape, nor could they have got away 
if not arrested by a bullet. In a majority of instances there 
was not even a trangression of a prison rule, and when there 
\vas such a transgression it was a mere harmless inadvertance. 
The slaying of every man there was a foul crime. 

The most of this was done by very young boys ; some of it by 
old men. The Twenty-Sixth Alabama and Fifty-Fifth Georgia, 
had guarded us since the opening of the prison, but now they 
were ordered to the field, and their places filled by the Georgia 
" Reserves," an organization of boys under, and men over th*-^ 



51.92 AXDEKSONVILLE. 

military age. As General Grant aptly phrased it, " They had 
robbed the cradle and the grave," in forming these regiments. 
The boys, who had grown up from children since the war 
began, could not comprehend that a Yankee was a human 
being, or that it was any more wrongful to shoot one than to 
kill a mad dog. Their young imaginations had been inflamed 
with stories of the total depravity of the Unionists until they 
believed it was a meritorious thing to seize every opportunity 
to exterminate them. 

Early one morning I overheard a conversation between two 
of these youthful guards : — 

" Say, Bill, I heerd that you shot a Yank last night ? " 

"Kow, you just bet I did. God ! you jest ought to've heerd 
him holler." 

Evidently the juvenile murderer had no more conception 
that he had committed crime than if he had killed a rattlesnake. 

Among those who came in about the last of the month were 
two thousand men from Butler's command, lost in the disas- 
trous action of May 15, by which Butler was " bottled up " at 
Bermuda Hundreds. At that time the Kebel hatred for Butler 
verged on insanity, and they vented this upon these men who 
were so luckless — in every sense — as to be in his command. 
Ever}'- pains was taken to mistreat them. Stripped of every 
article of clothing, equipment, and cooking utensils — every- 
thing, exce})t a shirt and a pair of pantaloons, they were 
turned bareheaded and barefooted into the prison, and the 
worst possible place in the pen hunted out to locate them upon. 
This was under the bank, at the edge of the Swamp and at the 
eastern side of the prison, where the sinks were, and all filth 
from the upper part of the camp flowed down to them. The 
sand upon which they lay was dry and burning as that of a 
tropical desert ; they were without the slightest shelter of any 
kind, the maggot flies swarmed over them, and the stench was 
frightful. If one of them survived the germ theory of disease 
is a hallucination. 

The increasing number of prisoners made it necessary for 
the Eebels to improve their means of guarding and holding us 
in check. They threw up a line of rifle pits around the Stock- 
ade for the infantry guards. At intervals along this were piles 



A 6T0BY OF EEBEL MTLITAIiT PEI80N3. 193 

of hand grenades, which could be used with fearful effect in 
case of an outbreak. A strong star fort was thrown up at a 
little distance from the southwest corner. Eleven field pieces 
were mounted in this in such a way as to rake the Stockade 
diagonally. A smaller fort, mounting five guns, was buiJt at 
the northwest corner, and at the northeast and southeast 
corners were small lunettes, with a couple of howitzers eacli. 
Packed as we were we had reason to dread a single round from 
any of these works, which could not fail to produce fearful 
havoc. 

Still a plot was concocted for a break, and it seemed to the 
sanguine portions of us that it must prove successful. First a 
secret society was organized, bound by the most stringent oaths 
that could be devised. The members of this were divided into 
companies of fifty men each, under officers regularly elected. 
The secresy was assumed in order to shut out liebel spies and 
the traitors from a knowledge of the contemplated outbreak. 
A man named Baker — belonging, I think, to some New York 
regiment — was the grand organizer of the scheme. "We were 
careful in each of our companies to admit none to membership 
except such as long acquaintance gave us entire confidence in. 

The plan was to dig large tunnels to the Stockade at various 
places, and then hollow out the ground at the foot of the tim- 
bers, so that a half dozen or so could be pushed over with a 
little effort, and make a gap ten or twelve feet ^vide. AU these 
were to be thrown down at a preconcerted signal, the companies 
were to rush out and seize the eleven guns of the headquarters 
fort. The Plymouth Brigade was then to man these and turn them 
on the camp of the Peserves who, it was imagined, would drop 
their arms and take to their heels after receiving a round or so 
of shell. We would gather what arms we could, and place 
them in the hands of the, most active and determined. This 
would give us from eight to ten thousand fairly armed, resolute 
men, with which we thought we could march to Appalachicola 
Bay, or to Sherman. 

We worked energetically at our tunnels, which soon began 
to assume such shape as to give assurance that they would 
answer our expectations in opening the prison walls. 

Then came the usual bliglit to all such enterprises : a spy or 



194 AOTDEESONVILLE. 

a traitor revealed everything to "Wirz. One day a guard came 
in, seized Baker and took him out. "What was done with him 
I know not ; we never heard of him after he passed the inner 
gate. 

Immediately afterward all the Sergeants of detachments 
were summoned outside. There they met Wirz, who made a 
speech informing them that he knew aU the details of the plot, 
and had made sufficient preparations to defeat it. The guard 
had been strongly reinforced, and disposed in such a manner as 
to protect the guns from capture. The Stockade had been 
secured to prevent its falling, even if undermined. He said, in 
addition, that Sherman had been badly defeated by Johnston, 
and driven back across the river, so that any hopes of co-oper- 
ation by him would be ill-founded. 

"When the Sergeants returned, he caused the following notice 
to be posted on the gates : 

NOTICE. 

Not wishing to shed the blood of hundreds, not connected with those who concocted a mad 
plan to force the Stockade, and make in this way their escape, I hereby warn the leaders and 
those who formed themselves into a band to carry out this, that I am in possession of all the 
facts, and have made my dispositions accordingly, so as to frustrate it. No choice would be 
left me but to open with grape and canister on the Stockade, and what effect this would have, 
in this densely crowded place, need not be told. 

May 25, 1804. H. Wirz. 

The next day a line of tall poles, bearing white flags, were 
put up at some little distance from the Dead Line, and a notice 
was read to us at roll call that if, except at roU call, any gath- 
ering exceeding one hundred was observed, closer the Stockade 
than these poles, the guns would open with grape and canister 
without warning. 

The number of deaths in the Stockade in May was seven 
hundred and eight, about as many as had been killed in 
Sherman's army during the same time. 



CHAPTER XXX. 

JUNE — POSSIBILITIES OF A MTJKDEKOUS CANNONADE WHAT WAS 

PROPOSED TO BE DONE IN THAT EVENT A FALSE ALAKM — 

DETEKIOKATION OF THE RATIONS FEARFUL INCKEASE OF 

MORTALITY. 

After Wirz's threat of grape and canister upon the slightest 
provocation, we lived in daily apprehension of some pretext 
being found for opening the guns upon us for a general mas- 
sacre. Bitter experience had long since taught us that the 
Rebels rarely threatened in vain. Wirz, especially, was much 
more likely to kill without warning, than to warn without kill- 
ing. This was because of the essential weakness of his nature. 
He knew no art of government, no method of discipline save 
" kill them ! " His petty little mind's scope reached no further. 
He could conceive of no other way of managing men than the 
punishment of every offense, or seeming offense, with death. 
Men who have any talent for governing find little occasion for 
the death penalty. The stronger they are in themselves — the 
more fitted for controlling others — the less their need of enforc- 
ing their authority by harsh measures. 

There was a general expression of determination amon<y the 
prisoners to answer any cannonade with a desperate attempt to 
force the Stockade. It was agreed that anything was better 
than dying like rats in a pit or wild animals in a battue. It 
was believed that if anything would occur which would rouse 
half those in the pen to make a headlong effort in concert, the 
palisade could be scaled, and the gates carried, and, though it 
would be at a fearful loss of life, the majority of those making 



196 AifDEESONYILLE. 

the attempt would got out. If the Rebels would discharge 
grape and canister, or throw a shell into the prison, it would 
lash everybody to such a pitch that they would see that the 
sole forlorn hope of safety lay in wresting the arms away from 
our tormentors. The great element in our favor was the short- 
ness of the distance between us and the cannon. We could 
hope to traverse this before the guns could be reloaded more 
than once. 

Whether it would have been possible to succeed I am unable 
to say. It would have depended wholly upon the spirit and 
unanimity with which the elf ort was made. Had ten thousand 
rushed forward at once, each with a determination to do or die, 
I think it v/ould have been successful without a loss of a tenth 
of the number. But the insuperable trouble — in our disorgan- 
ized state — was want of concert of action. I am quite sure, 
however, that the attempt would have been made had the guns 
opened. 

One day, while the agitation of this matter was feverish, I 
was cooking my dinner — that is, boiling my pitiful little ration 
of unsalted meal, in my fruit can, with the aid of a handful of 
splinters that I had been able to pick up by a half day's dili- 
gent search. Suddenly the long rifle in the headquarters fort 
rang out angrily. A fuse shell shrieked across the prison — 
close to the tops of the logs, and burst in the woods beyond. 
It was answered with a yell of defiance from ten thousand 
throats. 

I sprang up — my heart in my mouth. The long dreaded 
time had arrived ; the Rebels had opened the massacre in which 
they must exterminate us, or we them. 

I looked across to the opposite bank, on which Avere standing 
twelve thousand men — erect, excited, defiant. I was sure that 
at the next shot they would surge straight against the Stockade 
like a mighty human billow, and then a carnage would begin 
the like of which modern times had never seen. 

The excitement and suspense were terrible. We waited for 
what seemed ages for the next gun. It was not fired. Old 
Winder was merely showing the prisoners how he could rally 
the guards to oppose an outbreak. Though the gun had a shell 
in it, it was merely a signal, and the guards came double-quick 



A STORY OF REBEL MILITAET PKIS0N8. 197 

Lag up by regiments, going into position in the rifle pits and by 
the hand-grenade piles. 

As we realized what the whole affair meant, we relieved our 
surcharged feelings with a few general yells of execration upon 
Eebels generally, and upon those around us particularly, and 
resumed our occupation of cooking rations, killing lice, and dis- 
cussing the prospects of exchange and escape. / 

The rations, like everything else about us, had steadily grown 
worse. A bakery was built outside of the Stockade in May, 
and our meal was baked there into loaves about the size of a 
brick. Each of us got a half of one of these for a day's ration. 
This, and occasionally a small slice of salt pork, was all that we 
received. I wish the reader would prepare himself an object 
lesson as to how little hfe can be supported on for any length, 
of time, by procuring a piece of corn bread the size of an ordi- 
nary brickbat, and a thin slice of pork, and then imagine how 
he would fare, with that as his sole daily ration, for long 
hungry weeks and months. Dio Lewis satisfied himself that 
he could sustain life on sixty cents a vfeek. I am sure that the 
food furnished us by the Eebels would not, at present prices, 
cost one-third that. They pretended to give us one-third of a 
pound of bacon and one and one-fourth pounds of corn meal. 
A week's rations then would be two and one-third pounds ot 
^^con — worth 'ten cents, and eight and three-fourths pounds 
of meal, worth, say, ten cents more. As a matter of fact, I do 
not presume that at any time we got this full ration. It would 
sm^prise me to learn that we averaged two-thirds of it. 

The meal was ground very coarse and produced great irrita- 
tion in the bowels. We used to have the most frightful cramps 
that men ever suffered from. Those who were predisposed to 
intestinal affections were speedily carried off by incurable 
diarrhea and dysentery. Of the twelve thousand and twelve 
men who died, four thousand died of chronic diarrhea ; eio-ht 
hundred and seventeen died of acute diarrhea, and one thousand 
three hundred and eighty-four died of dysenteria, making a 
total of six thousand two hundred and one victims to enteric 
disorders. 

Let the reader reflect a moment upon this number, till he 
comprehends fully how many six thousand two hundred and one 



198 AJfDEESO^'^VILLR. 

men are, and how much force, energy, training, and rich possi- 
bilities for the good of the community and country died with 
those six thousand two hundred and one young, active men. 
It may help his perception of the magnitude of this number to 
remember that the total loss of the British, during the Crimean 
war, by death in all shapes, was four thousand five hundred and 
ninety-five, or one thousand seven hundred and six less than 
the deatlis in Andersonville from dysenteric diseases alone. 

The loathsome maggot flies swarmed about the baliery, and 
dropped into the trough where the dough was being mixed, so 
that it was rare to get a ration of bread not contaminated with 
a few of them. 

It was not long until the bakery became inadequate to sup- 
ply bread for all the prisoners. Then great iron kettles were 
set, and mush was issued to a number of detachments, instead 
of bread. There was not so much cleanliness and care in pi'e- 
paring this as a farmer shows in cooking food for stock. A 
deep wagon-bed would be shoveled f idl of the smoking paste, 
which was then hauled inside and issued out to the detachments, 
the latter receiving it on blankets, pieces of shelter tents, or, 
lacliing even these, upon the bare sand. 

As still more ])risoners came in, neither bread nor musli could 
be furnislicd them, and a part of the detachments received 
their rations in meal. Earnest solicitation at length resulted in 
having occasional scanty issues of wood to cook this with. My 
detachment was allowed to choose which it would take — bread, 
mush or meal. It took the latter. 

Cooking the meal was the topic of daily interest. There 
were three ways of doing it : Bread, mush and " dumplings." 
In the latter the meal was dampened until it would hold 
together, and was rolled into little balls, the size of marbles, which 
were then boiled. The bread was the most satisfactory and 
nourishing; the mush the bulkiest — it made a bigger show, 
but did not stay with one so long. The dumplings held an 
intermediate position — the water in which they were boiled 
becoming a sort of a broth that helped to stay the stomach. 
We received no salt, as a rule. jSTo one knows the intense 
longing for this, when one goes without it for a while. "VYhen, 
after a privation of weeks we would get a teaspoonful of salt 




▲ 8T0EY OF EBBEL MILITAEY PEISONS. 199 

apiece, it seemed as if every muscle in our bodies was invigor- 
ated. We traded buttons to the guards for red peppers, 
and made our mush, or bread, or dumplings, hot with the fiery 
pods, in hopes that this would make up for the lack of salt, but it 

was a failure. One pinch of salt 

was worth all the pepper pods in • 

the Southern Confederacy. My 

little squad — now dmiiuished by 

death from five to three — cooked 

our rations together to economize 

wood and waste of meal, and 

m^^ quarreled among ourselves daily as 

-'^^'^^^ to whether the joint stock should 

be converted into bread, mush or 

cooKiNo MTjsH. dumpliugs. The decision depended 

apon the state of the stomach. If very hungry, we made 

mush ; if less famished, dumplings ; if disposed to weigh matters, 

bread. 

This may seem a trifling matter, but it was far from it. "We 
all remember the man who was very fond of white beans, but 
after having fifty or sixty meals of them in succession, began to 
find a suspicion of monotony in the provender. We had now 
six months of unvarying diet of corn meal and water, and 
even so slight a change as a variation in the way of combining 
the two was an agreeable novelty. 

At the end of June there were twenty-six thousand three 
hundred and sixty-seven prisoners in. the Stockade, and one 
thousand two hundred — just forty per day — had died during 
the month. 




CHAPTEK XXXL 

DYING BY INCHES — SEITZ, THE SLOW, AND HIS DEATH — STIGQAIiL 
AND EMEKSON RAVAGES OF THE SCU-KVY. 

May and June made sad havoc in the already thin ranks of 
our battahon. Nearly a score died in my company — L — and 
the other companies suiTered proportionately. Among the first 
to die of my company comrades, was a genial little Corporal, 
" Billy " PhiUips — who was a favorite with us all. Everything 
was done for him that kindness could suggest, but it was of 
little avail. Then " Bruno " Weeks — a young bo}^, the son of 
a preacher, who had run away from his home in Fulton County, 
Ohio, to join us, succumbed to hardship and privation. 

The next to go was good-natured, harmless Yictor Seitz, a 
Detroit cigar maker, a German, and one of the slowest of 
created mortals. How he ever came to go into the cavalry 
was beyond the wildest surmises of his comrades. Why his 
supernatural slowness and clumsiness did not result in his being 
killed at least once a day, while in the service, was even still 
farther beyond the power of conjecture. No accident ever 
happened in the company that Seitz did not have some share 
in. Did a horse fall on a slippery road, it was almost sure to 
be Seitz' s, and that imported son of the Fatherland was equally 
sure to be caught under him. Did somebod}'- tumble over a bank 
of a dark night, it was Seitz that we soon heard making his way 
back, swearing in deep German gutterals, with frequent allu- 
sion to tausend teufeln. Did a shanty blow down, we ran over 
and pulled Seitz out of the debris, when he would exclaim : 

" Zo ! dot vos pretty vunny now, ain't it ? " 

And as he surveyed the scene of his trouble with true Ger- 



A STORY OF KEBEL MILITAJiY PKISONS. 



201 



man phlegm, he would fish a brier-wood pipe from the recesses 
of his pockets, fill it with tobacco, and go plodding oil' in a 
cloud of smolie in search of some fresh way to narrowly escape 
destructioiL He did not know enough about horses to pat a 





SEirZ ON HORSEBACK. 



snaffle-bit in one's mouth, and ^^et lie would draw the frisldest, 
most mettlesome animal in the corral, upon whose back he was 
scarcely more at home than he ^^rould be upon a slack rope. 
It was no uncommon thing to see a horse break out of ranks, 
and go past the battalion like the wind, witli poor Seitz cling- 
ing to his mane like the traditional grim Dea,th to a deceased 
African. We then knew that Seitz had thoughtlessly sunk the 
keen spurs he would persist in wearing, deep into the flanks of 
his high-mettled animal. 

These accidents became so much a matter-of-course that 
when anything unusual occurred in the company our first im- 
pulse was to go and help Seitz out. 

"When the bugle sounded " boots and saddles," the rest of us 
would pack up, mount, " count off b}'- fours from the right," 
and be ready to move out before the last notes of the call had 



■^02 AJNDEESOKVn.LE. 

fairly died away. Just then we would notice an unsaddled 
horse still tied to the hitching place. It was Seitz's, and that 
worthy would be seen approaching, pipe in mouth, and bridle 
•in hand, with calm, equable steps, as if any time before the 
expiration of his enlistment would be soon enough to accom- 
plish the saddling of his steed. A chorus of impatient and 
derisive remarks would go up from his impatient comrades : 
" For heaven's sake, Seitz, hurry up ! " 
" Seitz ! you are like a cow's tail — always behind ! " 
" Seitz, you are slower than the second coming of the 
Savior ! " 

" Cliristmas is a railroad train alongside of you, Seitz 1 " 
" If you ain't on that horse in half a second, Seitz, we'll go 
off and leave you, and the Johnnies will skin you alive ! " 
etc., etc. 

ITot a ripple of emotion would roU over Seitz's placid features 
under the sharpest of these objurgations. At last, losing all 
patience, two or three bovs would dismount, run to Seitz's 
horse, pack, saddle and bridle him, as if he were struck with a 
whuiwind. Then Seitz would mount, and we would move 
off. 

For all this, we liked Jiim. His good nature was boundless, 
and his disposition to oblige equal to the severest test. lie did 
not lack a grain of his full share of the calm, steadfast courage 
•of his race, and would stay where he was put, though Erebus 
yawned and bade him fly. He was very useful, despite his un- 
fitness for many of the duties of a cavalryman. He was a good 
guard, and always ready to take charge of prisoners, or be 
■sentry around wagons or a forage pile — duties that most of the 
boys cordially hated. 

But he came into the last trouble at Andersonville. He 

•stood up pretty well under the hardships of Belle Isle, but lost 

his cheerfulness — his unrepining calmness — after a few weeks 

in the Stockade. One da}^ we remembered that none of us 

ynad seen him for several days, and we started in search of him. 

/ "We found him in a distant part of the camp, lying near the 

( Dead Line. His long fair hair was matted together, his blue 

\ eyes had the flush of fever. Every part of his clothing was 

V gray with the lice that were hastening his death with their 



A ST<JKV (»F KEIJEL MULITAKV PKISONS. 



203 



torments. He uttered the lirst complaint I ever heard him 

make, as I came up to him : — 

" M}^ Gott, M , dis is worse dan a dog's det ! " 

In a fe^y days we gave him all the funeral in our power; 





J 

m 




^^^^^^^^^^a^^^^g^^ -^"---^ L.'^^?=-^ 



FIJSnDING SEITZ DEAD. 

tied his' big toes togetlier, folded bis hands across his breast, 
pinned to his shirt a slip of paper, upon which was Avritten — 

Victor E. Seitz, 
Co. L, Sixteenth Illinois Cavalry. 

.And laid his body at the South Gate, beside some scores of 
others that were awaiting the arrival of the six-mule wagon 
that hauled them to the Potter's Field, which was to be their 
last resting-place. 

John Emerson and John Stiggall, of my company, were 
two Norwegian boys, and fine specimens of their race — intel- 
ligent, faithful, and always ready for duty. They had an 
affection for each other that reminded one of the stories told 



204 AlfDEKSONYULLE. 

of the sworn attachment and the unfailing devotion that were 
common between two Gothic warrior 3'ouths. Coming into 
Andersonville some little time after the rest of us, they found 
all the desirable ground taken up, and they established their 
quarters at the base of the hill, near the Swamp. There they 
dug a little hole to lie in, and put in a layer of pine leaves. 
Between them they had an overcoat and a blanket. At night 
they lay upon the coat and covered tliemselves with the blanket. 
By day the blanket served as a tent. The hardships and 
annoyances that we endured made everybody else cross and 
irritable. At times it seemed impossible to say or listen to 
pleasant words, and nobody was ever allowed to go any length 
of time spoihng for a light. He could usually be accommo- 
dated upon the spot to any extent he desired, by simply making 
his wishes known. Even the best of chums would have sharp 
quarrels and brisk fights, and this disposition increased as dis- 
ease made greater inroads upon them. I saw in one instance 
two brothers — both of whom died the next day of scurvy — 
and who were so helpless as to be unable to rise, pull themselves 
up on their knees by clenching the poles of their tents — in. 
order to strike each other with clubs, and the}'- kept strildng 
until the bystanders interfered and took their weapons away 
from them. 

But Stiggall and Emerson never quarreled with each other. 
Their tenderness and affection were remarkable to wit- 
ness. They began to go the way that so many were 
going ; diarrhea and scurvy set in ; they wasted away tiH their 
muscles and tissues almost disappeared, leaving the skin lying 
flat upon the bones ; but their principal solicitude was for each 
other, and each seemed actually jealous of any person else doing 
anything for the other. I met Emerson one day, with one leg 
drawn clear out of shape, and rendered almost useless by the' 
scurvy. He was very "^^eak, but was hobbhng down towards 
the Creek with a bucket made from a boot leg. I said : 

" Johnny, just give me your bucket. I'll iiU it for you, and 
bring it up to your tent." 

" No ; much obliged, M " he wheezed out ; " my pardner 

wants a cool drink, and I guess /'^ better get it for him." 

Stiggall died in June. ' He was one of the first victims of 



A STORY OF KEBEI. MILn-AKY I'KISONS. 



205 




Bcnr73^ w^bich, in the succeeding fcAV weeks, carried off so 
many. All of us who had read sea stories had read much of 
this disease and its liorrors, but we had little conception of the 
dreadful reality. It usually manifested itself first in the mouth. 
The breath became unbearably fetid ; the gums svfelled until 
they protruded, livid and disgusting, beyond the lips. The 

^eeth became so loose tluit 
they frequently fell out, 
and the sufferer would 
pick tiiem up and set them 
back in their sockets. In 
attempting to bite the 
hard corn bread furnished 
by the bakery the teeth 
often stuck fast and were 
pulled out. The gums had 
a fashion of breaking 
away in large chunks, 
^vhicli would be swallowed 
or spit out. All the time 
one was eating his mouth 
would be filled with blood, fragments of gums and loosened teeth. 
l^Yightful, malignant ulcers appeared in other parts of the 
body ; the ever-present maggot flies laid eggs in these, and soon 
worms s-u'armed therein. The suffei-er looked and felt as if, 
though he yet lived and moved, his body was anticipating the 
rotting it would undergo a httle later in the grave. 

The last change was ushered in by the lower parts of the 
legs swelling. When this appeared, we considered the man 
doomed. We all had scurvy, more or less, but as long as it 
kept out of our legs we were hopeful. First, the ankle joints 
swelled, then the foot became useless. The swelling increased 
until the knees became stiff, and the sldn from these down was 
distended until it looked pale, colorless and transparent as a 
tightly blown bladder. The leg was so much larger at the bot- 
tom than at the thigh, that the sufferers used to make grim 
jokes about being modeled like a churn, " with the biggest end 
down." The man then became utterly helpless and usually 
died in a short time. 



A CASE or SCUBTT. 



206 AITDERSONVILLE. 

The official report puts down the n'>iml)er of deaths from 
scurvy at three thousand five hundi-ed .nid seventy-ibur, but 
Dr. Jones, the Rebel surgeon, reported to tlie Kebel Govern- 
ment his behef that nine-tenths of the great mortality of the 
prison was due, either directly or indirectly, to this cause. 

The only e'fort made by the Eebel iloctors to check its rav- 
ages was occasionally to*give a handful of sumach berries to 
some particularly bad case. 

When Stiggall died we thought Emerson would certainly 
follow him in a day or two, but, to our surprise, he lingered 
along until August before dying. 



CHAPTER XXXn. 

"OLE BOO," AOT) "OLE SOL, THE HAYMAKER " A FETID, BUEN- 

JNQ DESEKT — NOISOME WATEK, AND THE EFFECTS OF DKINKING- 
IT STEALING SOFT SOAI'. 

The gradually lengthening Summer days were insufferably 
long and wearisome. Each was hotter, longer and more tedi- 
ous than its predecessors. In my company was a none-too-bright 
feUow, named Dawson. During the chilly rains or the nipping- 
winds of our first days in prison, Dawson would, as he rose in 
the morning, survey the forbidding skies with lack-luster eyes 
and remark, oracularly : 

" Well, Ole Boo gits us agin, to-day." 

He was so unvarying in this salutation to the morn that his 
designation of disagreeable weather as " Ole Boo " became 
generally adopted by us. "When the hot weather came on, 
Dawson's rejnark, upon rising and seeing excellent prospects 
for a scorcher, changed to : "Well, Ole Sol, the Haymaker, 
is going to git in his work on us agin to-day." 

As long as he lived and was able to talk, this was Dawson's 
invariable observation at the break of day. 

He was quite right. The Ole Haymaker would do some 
famous work before he descended in the West, sending his level 
rays through the wide interstices between the somber pines. 

By nine o'clock in the morning his beams would begin to 
fairly singe everything in the crowded pen. The hot sand 
would glow as one sees it in the center of the unshaded hio-h- 
way some scorching noon in August. The high walls of the 
prison prevented the circulation inside of any breeze that 
might be in motion, while the foul stench rising from the- 



208 AITOEESONVLLLB. 

putrid Swamp and the rotting ground seemed to reach the 
skies. 

One can readily comprehend the horrors of death on the 
burnintr sands of a desert. But the desert sand is at least 
clean ; there is nothing worse about it than heat and intense 
dryness. It is not, as that was at Andersonville, poisoned with 
the excretions of thousands of sick and dying men, filled with 
disgusting vermin, and loading the air with the germs of death. 
The difference is as that between a brick-kiln and a sewer. 
Should the fates ever decide that I shaU be flung out upon 
sands to perish, I beg that the hottest place in tlie Sahara may 
be selected, rather than such a spot as the interior of the Ander- 
sonville Stockade. 

It may be said that we had an abundance of water, which 
made a decided improvement on a desert. Doubtless — had the 
water heenpure. But every mouthful of it was a blood poison, 
and helped promote disease and death. Even before reaching 
the Stockade it was so polluted by the drainage of the Rebel 
camps as to be utterly unfit for human use. In our part of 
the prison \ve sank several wells — some as deep as forty feet 
— to procure water. We had no other tools for this than our 
ever-faithful half canteens, and nothing wherewith to wall the 
wells. But a firm clay was reached a few feet below the sur- 
face, which afforded tolerable strong sides for tlie lower part, 
anu furnished material to make adobe bricks for curbs to keep 
out the sand of the upper part. The sides were continually 
giving away, however, and fellows were perpetually falling 
down the holes, to the great damage of their legs and arms. 
The water, which was drawn up in little cans, or boot leg buck- 
ets, by strings made of strips of cloth, was much better than 
that of the creek, but was still far from pure, as it contained 
the seepage from the filthy ground. 

The intense heat led men to drink great quantities of water, 
and this superinduced malignant dropsical complaints, which, 
next to diarrhea, scurvy and gangrene, were the ailments most 
active in carrying men off. Those affected in this way swelled 
up frightfully from day to da}^ Their clothes speedily became 
too small for them, and were ripped off, leaving them entirely 
naked, and they suffered intensely until death at last came to 



A. STOET OF KEBEL MILITARY PEISONS. 209 

their relief. Among those of my squad who died in this way, 
was a young man named Baxter, of the Fifth Indiana CaYah*y, 
taken at Chicamauga. lie was very fine looIi:ing — tall, slen- 
der, with regular features and intensely black hair and eyes ; 
he sang nicely, and was generally liked. A more pitiable 
object than he, when last I saw him, just before his death, can 
not be imagined. His body had swollen until it seemed mar- 
velous that the hmnan skin could bear so much distention with- 
out disruption. All the old look of bright intelligence had 
been driven from his face by the distortion of his features. 
His swarthy hair and beard, grown long and ragged, had that 
peculiar repulsive look which the black hair of the sick is prone 
to assmne. 

I attributed much of my freedom from the diseases to which 
others succumbed to abstention from water drinkins:. Loncj 
before I entered the army, I had constructed a theory — on 
premises that were doubtless as insufficient as those that boyish 
theories are usually based upon — that drinking water was a 
habit, and a pernicious one, which sapped away the energy. I 
took some trouble to curb my appetite for water, and soon 
found that I got along very comfortably without di^inking 
anything be3"ond that which was contained in my food. I fol- 
lowed this up after entering the army, di'inldng nothing at any 
time but a little coffee, and finding no need, even on the dust- 
iest marches, for anything more. I do not presume that in a 
year I drank a quart of cold water. Experience seemed to con- 
firm my views, for I noticed that the first to sink under a 
fatigue, or to yield to sickness, were those who were always on 
the lookout for drinking water, springing from their horses 
and struggling around every well or spring on the line of 
march for an opportunity to fill their cantbens. 

I made liberal use of the Creek for bathing purposes, how- 
ever, visiting it four or five times a, day during the hot days, to 
wash myself aU over. This did not cool one off much, for the 
shallow stream was nearly as hot as the sand, but it seemed to 
do some good, and it helped pass away the tedious hours. The 
stream was nearly aU the time filled as full of bathers as they 
could stand, and the water could do little towards cleansins- so 
many. The occasional rain storms that swept across the prison 
14 



210 AiTDEKSONVILLE. 

were welcomed, not only because they cooled the air tempore 
arily, but because they gave us a sllo^ver-bath. As they came- 
up, nearly every one stripped naked and got out where he^ 
could enjoy the full benefit of the falling water. Fancy, if 
possible, the spectacle of twenty-five thousand or thirty thou- 
sand men without a stitch of clothing upon them. The like 
has not been seen, I imagine, since the naked followers of 
Boadicea irathered in force to do battle to the Roman invaders. 

It was impossible to get really clean. Oar bodies seemed 
covered with a varnish-like, gammy matter that defied removal 
by water alone. I imagined that it came from the rosin or 
turpentine, arismg from the little pitch pine fires over which 
we hovered when cooking our rations. It would yield to noth- 
ing except strong soap — and soap, as I have before stated — 
was nearly as scarce m the Southern Confederacy as salt. We- 
in prison saw even less of it, or rather, none at all. The- 
scarcity of it, and our desire for it, recalls a bit of personal 
experience. 

I had steadfastly refused all offers of positions outside th© 
prison on parole, as, like the great majority of the prisoners, 
my hatred of the Rebels grew more bitter, day by day ; I felt 
as if I would rather die than accept the smallest favor at their 
hands, and I shared the common contempt for those who did. 
But, when the movement for a grand attack on the Stockade 
— mentioned in a previous cha])ter — was apparently rapidly 
coming to a head, I vras offered a temporary detail outside ta 
assist in making up some rolls. I resolved to accept; first 
because I thought I might get some information that would be 
of use in our enterprise ; and, next, because I foresaw that the 
rush through the gaps* in the Stockade would be bloody 
business, and by going out in advance I would avoid that much 
of the danger, and still be able to give effective assistance. 

I was taken up to Wu'z's office. He was writing at a desk 
at one end of a large room when the Sergeant brought me in. 
lie turned around, told the Sergeant to leave me, and ordered 
me to sit down upon a box at the other end of the room. 

Turning his back and resuming his writing, in a few minutes 
he had forgotten me. I sat quietly, taldng in the details for a 
haif-hour, and then, having exhausted evervthing else in the 



A 8T0BT OF BEBKL MILITARY PBI80NS. 



211 



room, I began "wondering what was in the box I was sitting 
upon. The lid was loose ; I hitched it forward a little without 
attracting "Wirz's attention, and slipped ray left hand down on 
a voyage of discovery. It seemed very likely that there was 




CONFISCATINO SOFT SOAP. 

something there that a loyal Yankee deserved better than a 
Rebsl. I found that it was a fine article of soft soap, A handful 
was scooped up and speedily shoved into my left pantaloons 
pocket. Expecting every instant that Wirz would turn around 
and order me to come to the desk to show my handwriting, I 
hastily and furtively wiped my hand on the back of my sliirt 
and watched Wirz with as innocent an expression as a school 
boy assumes when he has just flipped a chewed paper wad 
across the room. Wirz was still engrossed in his writing, and 
did not look around. I was emboldened to reach down for 
another handful. This was also successfully transferred, the 
hand wiped off on the back of the shirt, and the face wore its 
expression of infantile ingenuousness. Still "Wirz did not look 
up. I kept dipping up handful after handful, until I had 
gotten about a quart in the left hand pocket. After each 
handful I rubbed my hand off on the back of my shirt and 
waited an instant for a summons to the desk. Then the pro- 
cess was repeated with the other hand, and a quart of the 
saponaceous mush was packed in the right hand pocket. 



212 ANDBSSONTILLK. 

Shortly after Wirz rose and ordered a guard to take me away 
and keep me, until he decided what to do with me. The day 
was intensely hot, and soon the soap in my pockets and on the 
back of my shirt began burning like double strength Spanish 
fly blisters. There was nothing to do but grin and bear it. I 
set my teeth, squatted down under the shade of the parapet of 
the fort, and stood it silently and sullenly. For the first time 
in my life I thoroughly appreciated the story of the Spartan 
boy, who stole the fox and suffered the animal to tear his 
bowels out rather than give a sign which would lead to the 
^exposure of his theft. 

Between four and five o'clock — after I had endured the thing 
for five or six hours, a guard came with orders from Wirz that 
I should be returned to the Stockade. Upon hastily removing my 
clothes, after coming inside, I found I had a bhster on each 
thigh, and one down my back, that would have delighted an 
old practitioner of the heroic school. ■ But I also had a half 
gallon of excellent soft soap. My chums and I took a magnifi- 
cent wash, and gave our clothes the same, and we still had soap 
enough left to barter for some onions that we had long cov- 
eted, and which tasted as ^sweet ^to us as manna to the Israel- 
ites. 



CnAPTER XXXIIL 

"pour passer LE temps " A SET OF CHESSMEN PROCUEEB UPTDEB 

DIFFICULTIES RELIGIOUS SERVICES THE DEVOTED PRIEST 

WAR SONG. 

• 

The time moved with leaden feet. Do the best we could, 
there were very many tiresome hours for which no occupation 
whatever could be found. All that was necessary to be done 
during the day — attending roll call, drawing and cooking 
rations, killing lice and washing — could be disposed of in an 
hour's time, and we were left with fifteen or sixteen waking 
hours, for which there was absolutely no employment. Yery 
many tried to escape both the heat and ennui by sleeping as 
much as possible through the day, but I noticed that those w^ho 
did this soon died, and consequently I did not do it. Card 
playing had sufRced to pass away the hours at first, but our 
cards soon wore out, and deprived us of this resource. My 
chum, Andrews, and I constructed a set of chessmen with an 
infinite deal of trouble. We found a soft, white root in the 
swamp which answered our purpose. A boy near us had a 
tolerably sharp pocket-knife, for the use of which a couple of 
hours each day, we gave a few spoonfuls of meal. The knife 
was the only one among a large number of prisoners, as the 
Eebel guards had an affection for that style of cutlery, which 
led them to search incoming prisoners very closely. The fortii- 
nate owner of this derived quite a little income of meal by 
shrewdly loaning it to his knifeless comrades. The shapes 
that we made for pieces and pawns were necessarily very rude, 



214 AITOEBSONVILLK. 

but they -were sufficiently distinct for identification. TVe 
blackened one set with pitch pine soot, found a piece of plank 
that would answer for a board and purchased it from its posses- 
sor for part of a ration of meal, and so were fitted out with 
what served until our release to distract our attention from 
much of the surrounding misery. 

Every one else procured such amusement as they could. 
Newcomers, who still had money and cards, gambled as long 
as their means lasted. Those who had books read them until 
the leaves fell apart. Those who had paper and pen and ink 
tried to write descriptions and keep journals, but this was 
usually given up after being in prison a few weeks. I was- for- 
tunate enough to know a boy who had brought a copy of 
" Gray's Anatomy " into prison with him. I was not spec- 
ially interested in the subject, but it was Ilobson's choice ; I 
could read anatomy or nothing, and so I tackled it with such 
good wiU that before my friend became sick and was taken 
outside, and his book with him, I had obtained a very fair knowl- 
edge of the rudiments of physiology. 

There was a little band of devoted Christian workers, among 
whom were Orderly Sergeant Thomas J. Sheppard, Ninety- 
Seventh O. Y. I., now a leading Baptist minister in Eastern 
Ohio ; Boston Corbett, who afterward slew John "Wilkes Booth, 
and Frank Smith, now at the head of the Railroad Bethel work 
at Toledo. They were indefatigable in trying to evangelizo 
the prison. A few of them would take their station in some 
part of the Stockade (a different one every time), and begin, 
singing some old familiar hymn like 

" Come, Thou fount of every blesising," 

and in a few minutes they would have an attentive audience of 
as many thousand as could get within hearing. The singing 
would be followed by regular services, during which Sheppard, 
Smith, Corbett, and some others would make short, spirited, 
practical addresses, which no doubt did much good to all who 
heard them, though the grains of leaven were entirely too small to 
leaven such an immense measure of meal. They conducted 
several funerals, as nearly like the way it was done at home as 
possible. Their ministrations were not confined to mere lip 



A 8T0BT OF REBEL MILITAIIT PRISONS. 



215 



service, but they labored assiduously in cariiif^ for the sick, 
and made many a poor fellow's way to the grave much 
smoother for him. 




RELIGIOUS SERVICES. 



This was about all the religious services that we were favored 
with. The Rebel preachers did not make that effort to save 
■our misguided souls which one would have imagined thej 
would. Having us where we could not choose but hear they 
miirht have taken advantage o'i our situation to rake us fore 
^nd aft with their theological artillery. They only attempted 
■it in one instance. While in Richmond a preacher came into 
our room and announced m an authoritative way that he would 
address us on religious subjects. TVe uncovered respectfully, 
•and gathered ground him. He was a loud-tongued, braAvling 
JBoanerges, who addressed the Lord as if drilling a brigade. 
lie spoke but a few moments before making apparent his 
•belief that the worst of crimes was that of being a Yankee, and 
that a man must not only be saved through Christ's blood, but 
also serve in the Rebel army before he could attain to heaven. 



216 



ASDEKSONTILLB. 



Of course we raised such a yell of derision that the sermoQ 
was brought to an abrupt conclusion. 

The only minister who came into the Stockade was a Cath- 
olic priest, middle-aged, tall, slender, and unmistakably devout. 
He was unwearied in his attention to the sick, and the whole 




THE PRIEST ANOINTING THE DYING. 

day could be seen moving around through the prison, attending 
to those who needed spiritual consolation. It was interesting 
to see him administer the extreme unction to a dying mau. 
Placing a long purple scarf about his own neck and a small 
brazen crucifix in the hands of the dying one, he would kneel 
jiy the latter's side and anoint him upon the eyes, ears, nostrils, 
lips, hands, feet and breast, with sacred oil, from a little brass 
vessel, repeating the while, in an impressive voice, the solemn 
offices of the Church. 

His unwearying devotion gained the admiration of all, no 
matter how little inclined one might be to view priesthnesa 
generally with favor. lie was evidently of such stuff as Chris- 
tian hcros have ever been made of, and Avould have faced 
stake and fagot, at the call of duty, with unquailing eye. Ilis 
name was Father Hamilton, and he was stationed at Macon. 
The world should know more of a man whose services were so 
creditable to humanity and his Church. 

The good father had the wisdom of the serpent, with the» 



A STORY OF REBEL MILirARY PRISONS. 21T 

harmlessness of the clove. Though full of commiseration for 
the u]ih<i]:»py lot of the prisoners, nothing could betray him into 
the slightest expression of opinion regarding the war or those 
who were the authors of all this misery. In our impatience at 
our treatment, and hunger for news, we forgot his sacerdotal 
character, and importuned him for tidings of the exchange. 
His invariable reply w^as that he lived apart from these things 
and kept liimseK ignorant of them. 

"But, father," said I one day, w^ith an impatience that I 
could not wdiolly repress, "you must certainly hear or read- 
something of this, while you are outside among the Rebel 
ofHcers." Like many other people, I supposed that the whole 
world was excited over that in which I felt a deep interest. 

" No, my son," replied he, in his usual calm, measured tones. 
" I go not among them, nor do I hear anything from them. 
When I leave the prison in the evening, full of sorrow at what 
I have seen here, I find that the best use I can make of my 
time is in studying the "Word of God, and especially the Psalms 
of Dav^d." 

We were not any longer good company for each other. We 
had heard over and over again all each other's stories and jokes, 
and each knew as much about the other's j^revious history as we 
chose to communicate. The story of every individual's past life, 
relations, friends, regiment, and soldier experience had l:)een told 
again and again, until the repetition was wearisome. The cool 
nights following the hot days w^ere favorable to little gossiping 
seances like the yarn-spinning watches of sailors on pleasant 
nights. Our squad, though its stock of stories was worn thread- 
bare, was fortunate enough to have a sweet singer in Israel — 
"Nosey" Payne — of whose tunefulness we never tired. He 
had a large repertoire of patriotic songs, which he sang with 
feeling and correctness, and w^hich helped much to make the 
calm Suinmer nights pass agreeably. Among the best of these 
was the following, which I always thought was the finest 
l)^ad, both in poetry and music, produced by the War : — 



•218 



AITDEKSONVILLE. 

BRAYE BOYS ARE THEY I 






H^-b? 



^ — ^- 



- 0-^ — (0 — s — 



Ileav - i - Iv falls the rain, Wild are the bre^'Z - es lo- 






-^ -.V 






3i 



ni^-lit; But 'neath the roof, the hours as they fly, Are 



\ IS Kit net! 



-^-:^=f=IE? 



t-^r- 



ts: 



Ei^ 



liap-py and calm and bright. Gath-er-ing round our 

s ! , s 



Wr^=\. 






%^ — 9 — #-g-qg — - 



^: 



-1^- 



-^^5 



— ^— 
-^. — 



tire - side, Tho' it be sum-nier time, We sit and talk of 




i^l 



brotli-ers a - broad, For-get - ting tlie mid - night chime. 
«:horis. 



■^fcJzz=' 



^-=-« iT 



-y- 



^^S 



Brave bovs are tJiev! Gone at tlieir coun - trv's call 



And 



it 



0-- g 6 

-«■-»■-&■ 

Brave bnvs are thev ! 






\ 



m 



§iiifcB: 



?-t> -— ^- 



Gone at their conn -try's call 

-^— ! p 



And 






Kilarei.'TN 



^Kt 



=1 f^- 



->-» ^- 



'g/ — ^" 






^ 



yet, and yet, we can not forget, That u:iany brave boys must fall. 



?zk 



9—% al- 



3!— »- 



1 ^— H— i^ O- 



-^—mr-v-e, 



r\ rfj ^~r~i ! — n 



vet, and vet, we can not forsjet, Tliat manv brave bovs must fall 



mm 



A STORY OF REBEL MILITARY PRISONS. 219 

Under the homestead roof, 

Nestled so cozy and warm, 
WhUe soldiers sleep, with little or naught, 

To shelter them from the storm. 
Resting on grassy couches, 

Pillow'd on hQlocks damp ; 
Of martial fare, how little we know, 

Till brothers are in the camp. 

Chorus— Brixve boys are they 1 

Gone at their country's call ; 
And yet, and yet, we cannot forget, 
That many brave boys must fall. 

Thinking no less of them. 

Loving our country the more. 
We sent them forth to fight for the flag. 

Their fathers before them bore. 
Though the great tear-drops started, 

This was our parting trust : 
• God bless yon boys 1 we'll welcome you hom« 

When Rebels are in the dust." 

CM)-" Brave boys are they I 

Gone at their country's call ; 
And yet, and yet, we cannot forget. 
That many brave boys mast fall. 

May the bright wings of love, 

Guard them wherever they roam ; 
The time has come when brothers must flght 

And sisters must pray at home. 
Oh ! the dread field ©f battle 1 

Soon to be strewn with graves ! 
If brothers fall, then bury them wher« 

Our banner in triumph waves. 

CAoru*— Brave boys are they 1 

Gone at their country's call ; 
And yet, and yet, we cannot forget, 
That many brave boys must fall. 



CHAPTER XXXIV. 

MAGGOTS, LICE AJSTD KAIDERS PKACTICE8 OF THESE HUMAU 

VEKMm PLTINDEEING THE BICK AND DYING NIGHT ATTACKS, 

AND BATTLES BY DAY HARD TIMES FOK THE SMALL TRADERS. 

With each long, hot Summer hour the lice, the maggot-flies 
and the E''Yaarkers increased in numbers and venomous activ- 
ity. They were ever-present annoyances and troubles ; no time 
was free from them. The lice worried us by day and tormented 
us by night ; the maggot-flies fouled our food, and laid in sores 
and wounds larvae that speedily became masses of wriggling 
worms. The N'Yaarkers were human vermin that preyed upon 
and harried us unceasingly. 

They formed themselves into bands numbering from five to 
twenty-five, each led by a bold, unscrupulous, energetic scoun- 
drel. "We now called them " Raiders," and the most prominent 
and best known of the bands were called by the names of their 
ruffian leaders, as " Mosby's Raiders," " Curtis's Raiders," 
" Delaney's Raiders," " Sarsfield's Raiders," " CoUins's Raid- 
ers," etc. 

As long as we old prisoners formed the bulk of those inside 
the Stockade, the Raiders had slender picking. They would 
occasionally snatch a blanket from the tent poles, or knock a 
boy down at the Creek and take his silver watch from him ; 
but this was all. Abundant opportunities for secm-ing richer 
swag came to them with the advent of the Pl^^mouth Pilgrims. 
As had been before stated, these boys brought in with them a 
large portion of then' first instalment of veteran bounty — 
aggregating in amount, according to varying estimates, between 
twenty-five thousand and one hundred thousand dollars. The 



A 8TOET OF BEBEL MILITABT PKI80N8. 221 

Pilgrims were likewise ^Yell clothed, had an abundance of 
blankets and camp equipage, and a plentiful supply of per- 
sonal trinkets, that could be readily traded off to the Rebels. 
An average one of them — even if his money were all gone — 
was a bonanza to any band which could succeed in plundering 
him. Ilis watch and ,cliain, shoes, knife, ring, handkerchief, 
combs and similar trifles, would net several hundred dollars in 
Confederate money. The blockade, which cut off the Rebel 
3ommunication with the outer world, made these in great 
demand. Many of the prisoners that came in from the Army 
of the Potomac repaid robbing equally well. As a rule those 
from that Army were not searched so closely as those from the 
West, and not unfrequently they came in with all their belong- 
ings untouched, where Sherman's men, arriving the same day, 
would be stripped nearly to the buff. 

The methods of the Raiders were various, ranging all the 
way from sneak thievery to highway robbery. AU the arts 
learned in the prisons and purheus of Kew York were put into 
exercise. Decoys, " bunko-steerers " at home, would be on the 
look-out for promising subjects as each crowd of fresh prison- 
ers entered the gate, and by kindly offers to find them a sleep- 
ing place, lure them to where they could be easily despoiled 
during the night. If the victim resisted there was always suffi- 
cient force at hand to conquer him, and not seldom his life 
paid the penalty of his contumacy. I have known as many as 
three of these to be killed in a night, and their bodies — with 
throats cut, or skulls crushed in — be found in the morning 
among the dead at the gates. 

All men having money or valuables were under continual 
espionage, and when found in places convenient for attack, a 
rush was made for them. They were knocked down and their 
persons rifled with such swift dexterity that it was done before 
they realized what had happened. 

At first these depredations were only perpetrated at night. 
The quarry was selected during the day, and arrangements 
made for a descent. After the victim was asleep the band 
dashed down upon him, and sheared him of his goods vrith 
incredible swiftness. Those near would raise the cry of 
" Raiders I " and attack the robbers. If the latter had secured 



222 ANDEKSONYILLE. 

their booty they retreated with all possible speed, and were 
soon lost in the crowd. If not, they would offer battle, and 
signal for assistance from the other bands. Severe engago- 
ments of this kind were of continual occurrence, in which men 
were so badly beaten as to die from the effects. The weapons 
used were fists, clubs, axes, tent-poles, etc. The Kaiders were 
plentifully provided with the usual Aveapons of their class — 
slun2:-shots and brass-knuckles. Several of them had succeeded 
in smuggling bowie-knives into prison. 

They had the great advantage in these rows of being well' 
acquainted with each other, while, except the Plymouth 
Pilgrims, the rest of the prisoners were made up of small 
squads of men from each regiment in the service, and total 
strangers to all outside of their own httle band. The Haidera 
could concentrate, if necessary, four hundred or five hundred 
men upon any point of attack, and each member of the gangs 
had become so familiarized with all the rest by long association 
in New York, and elsewhere, that he never dealt a blow amiss, 
while their opponents were nearly as likely to attack friends as 
enemies. 

By the middle of June the continual success of the Raiders 
emboldened them so that they no longer confined their depre- 
dations to the night, but made their forays in broad dayhght, 
and there was hardlj'' an hour in the twenty-fom* that the cry 
of " Raiders ! Raiders ! " did not go up from some part of the 
pen, and on looking in the direction of the cry one would see a 
surging commotion, men struggling, and clubs being phed 
vigorously. This was even more common than the guards 
shootino^ men at the Creek crossino;. 

One day I saw " Dick Allen's Raiders," eleven in number, 
attack a man wearing the uniform of Ellett's Marine Brigade. 
He was a recent comer, and alone, but he was brave. He had 
come into possession of a spade, by some means or another, and 
he used this with delightful vigor and effect. Two or three 
times he struck one of his assailants so fairly on the head and 
with such good will that I congratulated myself that he had 
killed him. Finally, Dick Allen managed to shp around 
behind him unnoticed, and striking him on the head with a 
slung-shot, knocked him down, when the whole crowd pounced 



A 8T0ET OF KEBEL MILITAIIY PRISONS. 



22J 



upon him to kill him, but were driyen off by others raUjing 
his assistance. 

The proceeds of these forays enabled the Raiders to wax fat/ 
and lusty, while others were d^ ing from starvation. They al 







RAIDER FTCnT WrTTT ONE OF ELLETT R ]SrAIlINE BUTOADE. 



had good tents, constructed of stolen blankets, and their head- 
quarters was a large, roomy tent, with a circular top, situated 
on the street leading to the South Gate, and capable of accom- 
modating from seventy-five to one hundred men. All the 
material for this had been wrested away from others. While 
hundreds were dying of scurvy and diarrhea, from the miser- 
able, insufficient food, and lack of vegetables, these fellows had 
flour, fresh meat, onions, potatoes, green beans, and other- 



"224 . AITDERSONVILLK, 

things, the very looks of which were a torture to hungry, scor- 
butic, dysenteric men. They were on the best possible terms 
with the Rebels, whom they fawned upon and groveled before, 
and were in return allowed many favors, in the way of trading, 
going out upon detail, and making purchases. 

Among their special objects of attack were the small traders 
in the prison. "We had quite a number of these whose genius 
for barter was so strong that it took root and flourished even 
in that unpropitious soil, and during the time when new pris- 
oners were constantly commg in with money, they managed to 
accumulate small sums — from ten dollars upward, by trading 
•between the guards and the prisoners. In the period immedi- 
ately following a prisoner's entrance he was likely to spend 
all his money and trade off all his possessions for food, trusting 
to fortune to get him out of there when these were gone. 
Then was when he was profitable to these go-betweens, who 
managed to make him pay handsomely for what he got. The 
Haiders kept watch of these traders, and plundered them 

(whenever occasion served. It reminded one of the habits of 
the fishing eagle, which hovers 'around until some other bird 
^jatches a fish, and then takes it away. 



CHAPTER XXXV. 

A CX^irMUNITT "WITHOUT GOVERNMENT FOEMATION OF THE REG- 
ULATORS KAIDEES ATTACK KEY BUT ARE BLUFFED OFF 

ASSAULT OF THE REGULATORS ON THE RAmERS DESPERATE 

BATTLE OVERTHROW OF THE RAmERS. 

To fully appreciate the condition of affairs let it be remem- 
bered that we were a community of twenty-five thousand boys 
and young men — none too regardful of control at best — and 
now wholly destitute of government. The Eebels never made 
the slightest attempt to maintain order in the prison. Their 
whole energies were concentrated in preventing our escape. So 
long as we staid inside the Stoclvade, they cared as little what 
we did there as for the performances of savages in the interior 
of Africa. I doubt if they would have interfered had one-half 
of us killed and eaten the other half. They rather took a 
delight in such atrocities as came to their notice. It was an 
ocular demonstration of the total depravity of the Yankees. 

Among ourselves there was no one in position to lay down 
law and enforce it. Being all enlisted men we were on a dead 
level as far as rank was concerned — the highest being only 
Sergeants, whose stripes carried no weight of authority. The 
time of our stay was — it was hoped — too transient to make it 
worth while bothering about organizing any form of govern- 
ment. The great bulk of the boys were recent comers, 
who hoped that in another week or so they would be out again. 
There were no fat salaries to tempt any one to take upon him- 
self the duty of ruling the masses, and all were left to their own 
devices, to do good or evil, according to their several bents, 
and as fear of consequences swayed them. Each little squad of 
15 



226 ANDEKSONVILLK. 

men was a law unto themselves, and made and enforced their 
own regulations on their own territory. The administration of 
justice was reduced to its simplest terms. If a fellow did 
wrong he was pounded — if there A\'as anybody capable of 
doing it. If not he went free. 

The almost unvarying success of the Kaiders in their forays 
gave the general impression that they were invincible — that is, 
that not enough men could be concentrated against them to 
whip them. Our iU-success in the attack we made on them in 
April helped us to the same belief. If we could not beat them 
then, we could not nou^, after we had been enfeebled by months 
of starvation and disease. It seemed to us that the Plymouth 
Pilgrims, Avhose organization was yet very strong, should under- 
take the task ; but, as is usually the case in this world, where 
we think somebody else ought to midertake the performance of 
a disagreeable public duty, they did not see it in the light that 
we wished them to. They established guards around their 
squads, and helped beat off the Ptaiders when their own territor}'' 
was invaded, but this was all they would do. The rest of us 
formed similar guards. In the southwest corner of the Stock- 
ade — where I was — we formed ourselves into a company of 
fifty active boys — mostly belonging to my own battalion and 
to other Illinois regiments — of which I was elected Cap- 
tain. My First Lieutenant was a tall, taciturn, long-armed 
member of the One Hundred and Eleventh Illinois, whom we 
called " Egypt," as he cam% from that section of the State. 
He was wonderfully handy with his lists. I think he could 
knock a fellow down so that lie would fall harder, and lie 
longer than any person I ever saw. AYe made a tacit division 
of duties : I did the talking, and " Egj^pt " went through the man- 
ual labor of knocking our opponents down. In the numerous 
little encounters in which our company was engaged, "Egypt" 
would stand by my side, silent, grim and patient, while I pur- 
sued the dialogue with the leader of the other crowd. As soon 
as he thought the conversation had reached the proper point, 
his long left arm stretched out like a flash, and the other feUow 
dropped as if he had suddenly come in range of a mule that 
was feeling Avell. That unexpected left-hander never failed. 
It would have made Charles Reade's heart leap for joy to see it 



A BTOKY OF REBEL MrLITARY PKISONB. 227 

In spite of our company and our watchfulness, the Eaiders 
beat us badly on one occasion. Marion Friend, of Company I 
of our battalion, was one of the small traders, and had accumu- 
lated forty dollars by his bartering. One evening at dusk 
Delaney's Eaiders, about twenty-five strong, toolv advantage of 
the absence of most of us drawing rations, to make a rush for 
Marion. They knocked him down, cut him across the \vrist 
and neck with a razor, and robbed him of his forty dollars. 
By the time we could rally Delaney and his attendant scoun- 
drels were safe from pursuit in the midst of their friends. 

This state of things had become unendurable. Sergeant 
Leroy L. Key, of Company M, our battalion, resolved to make 
an effort to crush the Raiders. lie was a printer, from Bloom- 
ington, Illinois, tall, dark, intelligent and strong-willed, and 
one of the bravest men I ever knew. lie Avas ably seconded 
by " Limber Jim," of the Sixty-Seventh Illinois, whose lithe, 
sinewy form, and striking features reminded one of a young 
Sioux brave. He had all of Key's desperate courage, but not 
his brains or his talent for leadership. Though fearfully 
reduced in numbers, our battalion had still about one hundred 
■well men in it, and these formed the nucleus for Key's band of 
" Regulators," as they were styled. Among them were several 
who had no equals in physical strength and courage in any of 
the Raider chiefs. Our best man was 'Ned Carrigan, Corporal 
of Company I, from Chicago — who was so confessedly the 
best man in the whole prison that he was never called upon to 
demonstrate it. lie was a big-hearted, genial Irish boy, who 
was never known to get into trouble on his own account, but 
only used his fists when some of his comrades were imposed 
upon. He had fought in the ring, and on one occasion had 
kiUed a man with a single blow of his fist, in a prize fight near 
St. Louis. We were aU very proud of him, and it was as good 
as an entertainment to us to see the noisiest roughs subside into 
deferential silence as ISTed would come among them, like some 
grand mastiff in the midst of a pack of yelping curs. Ned 
entered into the regulating scheme heartily. Other stalwart 
specimens of physical manhood in our battalion were Sergeant 
Goody, Ned Johnson, Tom Larkin, and others, who, while not 



sas 



ANDEE80NVILLK 



approaching Carrigan's perfect manhood, vrere still more thaa 
a match for the best of the Eaiders. 

Key proceeded with the greatest secresy in the organization 
of his forces. He accepted none but Western men, and pre- 




KET BLUFFING HIS WOTILD-BE ASSASSINS. 

ferred Illinoisans, lowans, Kansans, Indianians and Ohioans. 
The boys from those States seemed to naturally go together, 
and be moved by the same motives. He informed Wirz what 
he proi)ose(l doing, so that any unusual commotion within the 
prison migbt not be mistaken for an attempt upon the Stock- 
ade, and made the excuse for opening with the aTetillery. 
Wirz, who happened to be in a complaisant humor, approved of 
the design, and allowed him the use of the enclosure of the 
North Gate to confine his prisoners in. 

In spite of Key's efforts at secresy, information as to his 
scheme reached the Eaiders. It was debated at their head- 



A 8T0ET OF SEBBL MILITAET PRISONS. 229 

quarters, and decided there that Key must be killed. Three 
men were selected to do this work. They called on Key, at 
dusk, on the evening of the 2d of July. In response to 
their inquiries, he came out of the blanket-covered hole on the 
hillside that he called his tent. They told him what they had 
heard, and asked if it was true. He said it was. One of them 
then drew a knife, and the other two, " billies " to attack him. 
But, anticipating trouble. Key had procured a revolver 
which one of the Pilgrims had brought in in his knapsack, 
and drawing this he drove them off, but without firing a shot. 

The occurrence caused the greatest excitement. To us of 
the Eegulators it showed that the Raiders had penetrated our 
designs, and were prepared for them. To the great majority 
of the prisoners it was the first intimation that such a thing 
was contemplated ; the news spread from squad to squad with 
the greatest rapidity, and soon everybody was discussing the 
chances of the movement. For awhile men ceased their inter- 
minable discussion of escape and exchange — lot those over- 
worked words and themes have a rare spell of repose — and 
debated whether the Raiders would whip the Regulators, or 
the Regulators conquer the Raiders. The reasons Avhich I 
have previously enumerated, induced a general disbelief in the 
probability of our success. The Raiders were in good health, 
well fed, used to operating together, and had the confidence 
begotten by a long series of successes. The Regulators lacked 
in all these respects. 

"Whether Key had originally fixed on the next day for 
making the attack, or whether this affair precipitated the 
crisis, I know not, but later in the evening he sent us all orders 
to be on our guard all night, and ready for action the next 
morning. 

There was very little sleep anywhere that night. The 
Rebels learned through their spies that something unusual was 
going on inside, and as their only interpretation of anything 
unusual there was a design upon the Stockade, they strength- 
ened the guards, took additional precautions in every way, and 
spent the hours in anxious anticipation. 

We, fearing that the Raiders might attempt to frustrate the 
scheme by an attack in overpowering force on Key's squad, 



230 AITDEESONVLLLK. 

which "would be accompanied by the assassination of him and 
Limber Jim, held om^elves m readiness to offer any assistance 
that might be needed. 

The Raiders, though confident of success, were no less 
exercised. They threw out pickets to all the approaches to 
their headquarters, and provided otherwise against siirprise. 
They had smuggled in some canteens of a cheap, vile whislcy — 
made from sorghum — and they grew quite hilarious in their 
Big Tent over their potations. Two songs had long ago been 
accepted by us as peculiarly the Eaiders' own — as some one 
in their crowd sang them nearly every evening, and we never 
heard theni anywhere else. The first began : 

Jn Athol lived a man named Jerry Lanagan; 

He battered away till he had n't a pound. 
His father he died, and he made him a man agin; 

Left him a farm of ten acres of ground. 

The other related the exploits of an Irish highwa\Tnan 
named Brennan, whose chief virtue was that 

What he rob-bed from the rich he gave unto the poor. 

And this was the villainous chorus in which they all joined, 
and sang in such a way as suggested highway robbery, murder, 
mayhem and ai'son : 

Brennan on the moor I 
Brennan on the moor 1 

Proud and undaunted stood 
John Brennan on the moor. 

They howled these two nearl}'- the live-long night. They 
became eventually quite monotonous to us, who Avere waiting 
and watching. It would have been quite a rehef if they had 
thrown in a new one every hour or so, by way of variety. 

Morning at last came. Our companies mustered on their 
grounds, and then marched to the space on the South Side 
where the rations were issued. Each man was armed ^dth a 
small club, secured to' his wrist bv a strinir. 

The Ilebels — with their chronic fear of an outbreak ani- 
mating them — had all the infantry in line of battle with 
loaded guns. The cannon in the works were shotted, the fuses 
thrust into the touch-holes and the men stood with lanyards in 
hand ready to mow down everybody, at anv instant. 



A 8T()RY »>K KKHKL MIMTAKY PKltJoMS. 



281 



The sun rose rapidly tlirougii the clear sky, which soon 
glowed down on us like a brazen oven. The whole camp 
gathered where it could best view the encounter. This was 
upon the Korth Side. As I have before explained the two 




REBEI, ARTTT.T.F.KfPT^ TT?ATXT.vn TTTK CAXKON ON TTTE PRISON. 

sides sloped to^\'ard each other like those of a great trough. 
The Haiders' headquarters stood upon the center of the southern 
slope, and consequently those standing on the northern slope 
saw everything as if upon the stage of a theater. 

While standing in ranks waiting the orders to move, one of 
ray comrac^es touched me on the arm, and said : — 

" My God ! just look over there! " 

I turned from Avatching the Rebel artillerists, whose inten- 
tions gave me more uneasiness than anything else, and looked 
in the direction indicated by the speaker. The sight was the 
strangest one my eyes ever encountered. There were at least 
fifteen thousand — perhaps twenty thousand — men packed 
together on the bank, and every eye was turned on us. The 
slope was such that each man's face showed over the shoulders 
of the one in front of him, making acres on acres of faces. It 
was as if the whole broad hillside was paved or thatched with 
human countenances. 



S32 



AITDERSONVILLE. 



"When all was ready we moved down upon the Big Tent, in 
as good order as we could preserve while passing through the 
narrow tortuous paths between the tents. Key, Limber Jim, 
Ned Carrigan, Goody, Tom Larkin, and Ned Johnson led the 




OVEKTHKOW OF TUE PATDERS. 



advance with their companies. The prison was as silent as a 
grave3"ard. As we approached, the Eaiders massed themselves 
in a strong, heavy line, with the center, against which oiir 
advance was moving, held by the most redoubtable of their 
leaders. How many there were of them could not be told, as 
it was impossible to say where their line ended and the mass of 
spectators began. They could not themselves tell, as the atti- 
tude of a large portion of the spectators would be determined 
by which way the battle Avent. 

Not a blow Avas struck until the hues came close together. 
Then the Raider center launched itself forward against ours, 
and grappled savagely Avith the leading Kegulators. For an 
instant — it seemed an hour — the struggle was desperate. 



A. STOKT OF REBEL MILITARY PRISONS. 233 

Strong, fierce men clenched and strove to throttle each other ; 
great muscles strained almost to bursting, and blows with fist 
and club — dealt with all the energy of mortal hate — fell like 
hail. One — perhaps two — endless minutes the lines surged 
— throbbed — backward and forward a step or two, and then, 
as if by a concentration of mighty elfort, our men flung the 
Kaider line back from it — broken — shattered. The next 
instant our leaders were striding through the mass like raging 
lions, Carrigan, Limber Jim, Larkin, Johnson and Goody 
each smote down a swath of men before them, as they moved 
resistlessly forward. 

"We light weights had been sent around on the flanks to 
separate the spectators from the combatants, strike the Raiders 
en revers, and, as far as possible, keep the crowd from reinforc- 
ing them. 

In five minutes after the first blow was struck the overthrow. 
of the Raiders was complete. Resistance ceased, and they 
sought safet}^ in flight. 

As the result became apparent to the watchers on the opposite 
hillside, they vented their pent-up excitement in a yell that 
made the very ground tremble, and we ans^vered them with a 
shout that expressed not only our exultation over our victory 
but our great relief from the intense strain Ave had long borne. 

We picked up a few prisoners on the battle field, and retired 
without making any special effort to get any more then, as we 
knew that they could not escape us. 

We were very tired, and very hungry. The time for draw- 
ing rations had arrived. Wagons containing bread and mush 
had driven to the gates, but Wirz would not allow these to be 
opened, lest in the excited condition of the men an attempt 
might be made to carry them. Key ordered operations to 
cease, that AVirz might be re-assured and let the rations enter. 
It was in vain. Wirz was thoroughly scared. The wagons 
stood out in the hot sun until the mush fermented and soured, 
and had to be thrown away, while we went rationless to bed, 
and rose the next day with more than usually empty stomachs 
to goad us on to our work. 



CHAPTEE XXXYI. 

WHY THE REGULATORS WERE NOT ASSISTED BY THE ENTTEB 
CAilP — PECULIARITIES OF BOYS FROM DIFFERENT 6ECTION8 — 
HUNTING THE RAIDERS DOWN — EXPLOITS OF MY LEFT-HANDED 
LIEUTENANT RUNNING THE GAUNTLET. 

I may not have made it wholly clear to the reader why we 
did not have ti.e active assistance of the whole prison in the 
struggle with the Haiders. There were many reasons for this. 
First, the great bulk of the prisoners were new comers, having 
been, at the farthest, but three or four weeks in the Stockade. 
They did not comprehend the situation of affairs as we older 
prisoners did. They did not understand that all the outrages 
— or very nearly all — were the work of a relatively small 
crowd of graduates from the metropolitan school of vice. The 
activity and audacity of the Raiders gave them the impression 
that at least half the able-bodied men in the Stockade were 
engaged in these depredations. This is always the case. A 
half dozen burglars or other active criminals in a town will 
produce the impression that a large portion of the population 
are law-breakers. AVe never estimated that the raiding 
N'Yaarkers, with their spies and other accomphces, exceeded 
five hundred, but it would have been difficult to convince a new 
prisoner that there were not thousands of them. Secondly, 
the prisoners were made up of small squads from every regi- 
ment at the front along the whole line from the Mississippi to 
the Atlantic. These were strangers to and distrustful of all out- 
side their own little circles. The Eastern men were especially 
so. The Pennsylvanians and ISTew Yorkers each formed groups, 
and did not fraternize readily with those outside their 



A 8T0EY OF EEBEL MILITAKT PRISONS. 235 

State lines. The l^ew Jerseyans held aloof from all the rest, 
while the Massachusetts soldiers had very little in common 
with anybody — even their fellow Kew Englanders. The 
Michigan men were modified Kew Englanders. They had the 
same tricks of speech ; the}^ said " I be " for " I am," and 
" haag " for " hog ; " " Let me look at your knife half a sec- 
ond," or " Give me just a sup of that water," where Ave said 
simply " Lend me your knife," or " hand me a drink." They 
were less reserved than the true Yankees, more disposed to be 
social, and, with all their eccentricities, were as manly, honor- 
able a set of fellows as it was my fortune to meet with in the 
army, I could ask no better comrades than the boys of the 
Third Michigan Infantry, who belonged to the same " Ninety " 
with me. The boys from Minnesota and Wisconsin were very 
much like those from Michigan. Those from Ohio, Indiana, 
Illinois, Iowa and Kansas all seemed cut off the same piece. 
To all intents and purposes they might have come from the 
same County. They spoke the same dialect, read the same 
newspapers, had studied McGuffey's Headers, ]\Iitcheirs Geog- 
raphy, and Ray's Aritbmetics at school, admired the same 
great men, and held generally the same opinions on any given 
subject. It Avas never difficult to get them to act in 
unison — they did it spontaneously ; while it required an effort 
to bring about harmony of action with those from other sec- 
tions. Had tlie "Western boys in prison been thoroughly 
advised of the nature of our enterprise, we could, doubtless, 
have commanded their cordial assistance, but they Avere not, 
and there was no Avay in which it could be done readil}', until 
after the decisive blow was struck. 

The work of arresting the leading Raiders Avent on actively 
all day on the Fourth of July. They made occasional shows of 
fierce resistance, but the events of the day before had destroyed 
their prestige, broken their confidence, and driA'en aAA'ay from 
their support very many Avho folloAved their lead Avhen they 
were considered all-poAverful. They scattered from their 
former haunts, and mingled Avith the crowds in other parts of 
the prison, but were recognized, and reported to Key, who 
sent parties to arrest them. ScA^eral times they managed to 
collect enough adherents to di'ive off the squads sent after them, 



236 andekso:nville. 

but this only gave them a short respite, for the squad would 
return reinforced, and make short work of them. Besides, the 
prisoners generally were beginning to understand and approve 
of the Eegulators' movement, and Avere disposed to give all the 
assistance needed. 

Myself and " Egypt," my taciturn Lieutenant of the sinewy 
left arm, were sent with our company to arrest Pete Donnelly, 
a notorious character, and leader of a bad crowd. He was 
more " knocker " than Kaider, however. lie was an old Pem- 
berton building acquaintance, and as we marched up to where 
he was standing at the head of his gathering clan, he recognized 
me and said : 

" Hello, Illinoy," (the name by which I was generally known 
in prison) " what do you want here ? " 

I replied, " Pete, Key has sent me for you. I want you to go 
to headquarters." 

" What the does Ke}'' want with me ? " 

" I don't know, I'm sure ; he only said to bring you." 

" But I haven't had anything to do with them other snoozers 
you have been a-having trouble with." 

" I don't know anything about that ; you can talk to Key as 
to that. I only know that we are sent for you." 

" Well, you don't think you can take me unless I choose to 
go ? You haint got anybody in that crowd big enough to make 
it worth while for him to waste his time trying it." 

I replied diffidently that one never knew what he could do 
tiU he tried ; that while none of us were very big, we were as 
willing a lot of little fellows as he ever saw, and if it were aU 
the same to him, we would undertake to waste a little time 
getting him to headquarters. 

The conversation seemed unnecessarily long to "Egypt," who 
stood by m}'- side, about a haU; step in advance. Pete was 
becoming angrier and more defiant every minute. His 
followers were crowding up to us, club in hand. Finally Pete 
thrust his fist in my face, and roared out : — 

" By , I ain't a going with ye, and ye can't take me, 

you " 

This was '* Egypt's " cue. His long left arm uncoupled like the 
loosening of the weight of a pile-driver. It caught Mr. Donnelly 



A STORT OF EEBEL MILITAKY PRISONS. 



237 



under the chin, fairly lifted him from his feet, and dropped 
him on his back among his followers. It seemed to me that 
the predominating expression in his face as he ^vent ovor was 
that of profound wonder as to where that blow cuulu h.ive 



^c^-i^^ 




ARKEST OF PETE DOXNELLT. 



come from, and why he did not see it in time to dodge or ward 
it off. 

As Pete dropped, the rest of us. stepped forward with our 
clubs, to engage his followers, while "Egypt" and one or two 
others tied his hands and otherwise secured him. But his 
henchmen made no effort to rescue him, and vre carried him 
over to headquarters without molestation. 

The work of arresting increased in interest and excitement 
until it developed into tlie furore of a hunt, with thousands 
eagerly engaged in it. Tlie Raiders' tents were torn down and 
pillaged. Blankets, tent poles, and cooking utensils were 
carried off as spoils, and the ground was dug over for secreted 
property. A large quantity of watches, chains, knives, rings, 
gold pens, etc., etc. — the booty of many a raid — was found, and 
helped to give impetus to the hunt. Even the Rebel Quarter- 
master, with the characteristic keen scent of the Rebels for 
spoils, smeUed from the outside the opportunity for gaining 



238 A2SDEK80NVILLK. 

plunder, and came in with a squad of Rebels equipped with 
spades, to dig for buried treasures. How successful lie was I 
know not, as I took no part m any of the operations of that 
nature. 

It was claimed that several skeletons of victims of the Raid- 
ers were found buried beneath the tents. I cannot speak with 
any certainty as to this, though my impression is that at least 
one was found. 

By evening Key had perhaps one hundred and twenty-five of 
the most noted Raiders in his hands. Wirz had allowed him 
the use of the small stockade forming the entrance to the 
North Gate to confine them in. 

The next thing Avas the judgment and punislimcnt of the 
arrested ones. For this purpose Key organized a court martial 
composed of thirteen Sergeants, chosen from liie latest arrivals 
of prisoners, that they might have no i)i-ejn(lice against the 
Raiders. I believe that a man named Dick I\IcCullough, 
belonging to the Third Missouri Cavalry, was the President of 
the Court. The trial was carefully conducted, Avith all the 
formality of a legal procedure that the Court and those manag- 
ing the matter could remember as applicable to the crimes with 
which the accused were charged. Each of these was con- 
fronted by the witnesses who testified against him, and allowed 
to cross-examine them to any extent he desired. The defense 
was managed by one of their crowd, the foul-tongued Tombs 
shyster, Pete Bradley, of whom I have before spoken. Such 
was the fear of the vengeance of the Raiders and their friends 
that many who had been badly abused dared not testify against 
them, dreading midnight assassination if they did. Others would 
not go before the Court except at night. But for all this there 
was no lack of evidence ; there were thousands who had been 
robbed and maltreated, or who had seen these outrages com- 
mitted on others, and the boldness of the leaders in their hight 
of pov/er rendered their identification a matter of no difficulty 
whatever. 

The trial lasted several days, and concluded with sentencing 
quite a large number to run the gauntlet, a smaller number to 
wear balls and chains, and the following six to be hanged : 

John Sarsfield, One Hundred and Forty-Fourth 'New York. 



▲ 8T0BT OF KEBEL MILITAilT PKI80N8. 239 

"WiUiam Collins, alias " Mosby," Company D, Eighty-Eighth 
Pennsylvania, 

Chai'les Curtis, Company A, Fifth Rhode Island Artillery. 

Patrick Delaney, Company E, Eighty-Third Pennsylvania. 

A. Muir, United States ISTav}' . 

Terence Sullivan, Seventy-Second New York. 

These names and regiments are of httlo consequence, how- 
ever, as I believe all the rascals were professional bounty-jump- 
ers, and did not belong to any regiment longer than they could 
find an opportunity to desert and join another. 

Those sentenced to ball-and-chain Avere brought in immedi- 
ately, and had the irons fitted to them that had been worn 
by some of our men as a punishment for tr3ang to escape 

It was not yet determined how punishment should be meted 
out to the remainder, but circumstances themselves decided the 
matter. Wirz became tired of guarding so large a number as 
Key had arrested, and he informed Key that he should turn 
them back into the Stockade immediately. Key begged for 
little farther time to consider the disposition of the cases, but 
TVirz refused it, and ordered the Officer of the Guard to return 
all arrested, save those sentenced to death, to the Stock- 
ade. In the meantime the news had spread through the prison 
that the Raiders were to be sent in again unpunished, and an 
an fry mob, numbering some thousands, and mostly composed 
of men who had suffered injuries at the hands of the maraud- 
ers, gathered at the South Gate, clubs in hand, to get such sat- 
isfaction as they could out of the rascals. They formed in two 
long, parallel lines, facing inward, and grimly awaited the 
incoming of the objects of their vengeance. 

The Officer of the Guard opened the wicket in the gate, and 
began forcing the Raiders through it — one at a time — at the 
point of the bayonet, and each as he entered w^as told what he 
already realized well — that he must run for his life. They 
did this with all the energy that they possessed, and as they 
ran blow^s rained on their heads, arms and backs. If the}^ could 
succeed in breaking through the line at any place they were 
generally let go without any further punishment. Three of the 
number were beaten to death. I saw one of these killed. I 
had no hking for the gauntlet performance, and refused to have 



240 



ANDEKSONVILLK. 



anything to do ^yith it, as did most, if not all, of my crowd. 
"While the gauntlet was in operation, I was standing by my tent 
at the head of a little street, about two hundred feet from the 
line, watching what was being done. A sailor was let in. He had 
a large bowie knife concealed about his person somewhere, which 
iie drew, and struck savagely with at his tormentors on either 




1 I wi. 



'Ill .1 __ ^ . 




DEATH OF THE 8AIL0E 

side. They fell back from before him, but closed in behind 
and pounded him terribly. He broke through the line, and ran 
up the street towards me. About midway of the distance 
stood a boy who had helped carry a dead man out during the 
day, and while out had secured a large pine rail which he had 
brought in with him. lie Avas holding this straight up in the 
air, as if at a " present arms." He seemed to have known from 
the first that the Raider would run that way. Just as he came 
squarely under it, the boy dropped the rail like the bar of a toll 
gate. It struck the Raider across the head, felled him as if by 
a shot, and his pursuers then beat him to death. 



CHAPTEE XXXYIL 

THE EXECUTION BUILDING THE BCAFFOLD DOUBTS OF THB 

. CAMP CAPTAIN WIRZ THINKS IT 18 PKOBAULY A EUSE TO 

FORCE THE STOCKADE HIS PEEPAEATIONS AGAINST SUCH AK 

ATTEMPT ENTRANCE OF THE DOOMED ONES THEY EEAXIZB 

THEIR FATE ONE MAKES A DESPERATE ATTEMPT TO ESCAPE 

HIS RECAPTURE INTENSE EXCITEMENT WIRZ ORDERS THE 

GUNS TO OPEN FORTUNATELY THEY DO NOT THE SIX ARE 

HANGED ONE BREAKS HIS ROPE SCENE WHEN THE RAIDERS 

ARE CUT DOWN. 

It began to be pretty generally understood througb the prison 
that six men had been sentenced to be hanged, though no 
authoritative announcement of the fact had been made. There 
was much canvassing as to where they should be executed, and 
whether an attempt to hang them inside of the Stockade 
would not rouse their friends to make a desperate eJffort to res- 
cue them, which would precipitate a general engagement of 
even larger proportions than that of the 3d. Despite the 
result of the affairs of that a.nd the succeeding days, the camp 
was not yet convinced that the Raiders were really conquered, 
and the Regulators themselves Avere not thoroughly at ease on 
that score. Some five thousand or six thousand new prisoners 
had come in since the first of the month, and it was claimed 
that the Raiders had received large reinforcements from those, 
— a claim rendered probable by most of the new-comers being 
from the Army of the Potomac. 

Key and those immediately about him kept their own counsel 
in the matter, and suffered no secret of their intentions to leak 
out, until on the morning of the 11th, when it became generally 
16 



242 AJSTDEBSONVILLB. 

known th.at the sentences were to be carried into effect that day* 
and inside the prison. 

My first du'ect information as to this was by a messenger 
from Key with an order to assemble my company and stand 
guard over the carpenters who were to erect the scaffold. He 
informed me that all the Regulators would be held in readiness 
to come to our relief if we were attacked in force. I had 
hoped that if tlje men were to be hanged I would be spared the 
unpleasant duty of assisting, for, though I believed they richly 
deserved that punishment, I had much gather some one else 
administered it upon them. There was no way out of it, how- 
ever, that I could see, and so '■" Egypt " and I got the boys 
together, and marched down to the designated place, which 
was an open space near the end of the street running from the 
South Gate, and kept vacant for the purpose of issuing rations. 
It was quite near the spot where the Raiders' Big Tent had 
stood, and afforded as good a view to the rest of the camp as 
could be found. 

Key had secured the loan of a few beams and rough planks, 
sufficient to build a rude scaffold with. Our first duty was to 
care for these as they came in, for such was the need of wood, 
and plank for tent purposes, that they would scarcely have fallen 
to the ground before they were spirited away, had we not stood 
over them all the time with clubs. 

The carpenters sent by Key came over and set to work. 
The N'Yaarkers gathered around in considerable numbers, 
sullen and abusive. They cursed us with all theh' rich vocab- 
ulary of foul epithets, vowed that we should never carry out 
the execution, and swore that they had marked each one for 
vengeance. "VVe returned the compliments in kind, and occasion- 
ally it seemed as if a general collision was imminent ; but we 
succeeded in avoiding this, and by noon the scaffold was 
finished. It was a very simple affair. A stout beam was 
fastened on the top of two posts, about fifteen feet high. At about 
the hight of a man's head a couple of boards stretched across 
the space between the posts, and met in the center. The ends 
at the posts laid on cleats ; the ends in the center rested upon 
a couple of boards, standing upright, and each having a piece 
of rope fastened through a hole in it in such a manner, that a 



A 8TOBT OF REBEL MILITjUST PRISONS. 243 

man could snatch it from under the planks serving as the floor 
of the scaffold, and let the whole thing drop. A rude ladder to 
ascend by completed the preparations. 

As the arrangements neared completion the excitement in 
and around the prison grew intense. Key came over with the 
balance of the Regulators, and we formed a hollow square 
around the scaffold, our company making the line on the East 
Side. There were now thirty thousand in the prison. Of 
these about one-third packed themselves as tightly about our 
square as they could stand. The remaining twenty thousand 
were wedged together in a solid mass on the North Side. 
Again I contemplated the wonderful, startling, spectacle of 
a mosaic pavement of human faces covering the whole broad 
hillside. 

Outside, the Rebel infantry was standing in the rifle pits, the 
artillerymen were in place about their loaded and trained 
pieces, the Ko. 4 of each gun holding the lanyard cord 
in his hand, ready to fire the piece at the instant of command. 
The small squad of cavalry was drawn up on the hill near the 
Star Fort, and near it were the masters of the hounds, with their 
yelping packs. 

All the hangers-on of the Rebel camp — clerks, teamsters, 
employes, negros, hundreds of wliite and colored women, in all 
forming a motley crowd of between one and two tliousatul, 
were gathered together in a group between the end of: the rifle 
pits and the Star Fort. They had a good view from there, but 
a stiU better one could be had a little farther to the right, and 
in front of the guns. They kept edging up in that direction, 
as crowds will, though they knew the danger they would incur 
if the artillery opened. 

The day was broiling hot. Tiie sun shot his perpendicular 
rays down with blistering fierceness, and the densely packed, 
motionless crowds made the heat almost insupportable. 

Key took up his position inside the square to direct matters. 
"With him were Limber Jim, Dick McCullough, and one or two 
others. Also, iSTed Johnson, Tom Larkin, Sergeant Goody, 
and three others who were to act as hangmen. Each of tliese 
six was provided with a white sack, such as the ^j^ebels brought 
in meal in. Two Corporals of my company — " Stag" llarris 



244 Aj;rt)EESONVILLE. 

and "Wat Payne — were appointed to pull the stays from under 
the platform at the signal. 

A little after noon the South Gate opened, and Wirz rode in, 
dressed in a suit of white duck, and mounted on his white 
horse — a conjunction which had gained for him the appella- 
tion of "Death on a Pale Ilorse." Behind him walked the 
faithful old priest, wearing his Church's purple insignia of the 
deepest sorrow, and reading the serv^ice for the condemned. 
The six doomed men followed, walking between double ranks 
of Pebel guards. 

All came inside the hollow square and halted. "Wirz then 
said : 

" Brizners, I return to you dese men so goot as I got dem. 
You haf tried dem yourselves, and found dem guilty, I haf 
had notting to do wit it. I vash my hands of eferyting con- 
nected wit dem. Do wit dem as you like, ajid may Gott haf 
mercy on you and on dem. Garts, about face! Yorwarts, 
march ! " 

With this he marched out and left us. 

For a moment the condemned looked stunned. They seemed 
to comprehend for the firet time that it was really the deter- 
mination of the Regulators to hang them. Before that they had 
evidently thought that the talk of hanging was merely bluff. 
One of them gasped out : 

" My God, men, you don't really mean to hang us up there ? " 

Key answered grimly and laconically : 

" That seems to be about the size of it." 

At this they burst out in a passionate storm of intercessions 
and imprecations, which lasted for a minute or so, when it 
was stopped by one of them saying imperatively : 

" All of you stop now, and let the priest talk for us." 

At this the priest closed the book upon which he had kept 
his eyes bsnt since his entrance, and facing the multitude on 
the North Side began a plea for mercy. 

The condemned faced in the same direction, to read their 
fate in the countenances of those whom he was addressing. 
This movement brought Curtis — a low-statured, massively 
built man — on the right of their line, and about ten or fifteen 
steps from my company. 



A STORY OF REBEL MILITARY PRISONS. . 247 

The whole camp had been as still as death since Wirz's exit. 
The silence seemed to become even more profound as the priest 
began his appeal. For a minute every ear ^Yas strained to 
catch what he said. Then, as the nearest of the thousands 
comprehended what he was saying they raised' a shout of 

'^ No ! no a NO 1 ! " 

" Hang them ! hang them ! " 

" Don't let them go ! Never ! " 

" Hang the rascals ! hang the villains ! " 

" Hang 'em ! hang 'em ! hang 'em ! " 

This was taken up all over the prison, and tens of thousands 
throats yelled it in a fearful chorus. 

Curtis turned from the crowd with desperation convulsing 
his features. Tearing off the broad-brimmed hat which he 
wore, he flung it on the ground with the exclanuition : 

"By God, I'll die this way first!" and, drawing his head 
down and folding his arms about it, he dashed forward for 
the center of my company, like a great stone hurled from a 
catapult. 

"Egypt" and I saw where he was going to strike, and ran 
down the line to help stop him. As he came up we I'ained 
blows on his head with our clubs, but so many of us struck at 
him. at once that we broke each other's clubs to pieces, and 
only knocked him on his knees. He rose with an almost super- 
human effort, and plunged into the mass bej^ond. 

The excitement almost became delirium. For an instant I 
feared that everything was gone to ruin. " Eg3'pt " and I strained 
every energy to restore our lines, before the break could be 
taken advantage of by the others. Our boys behaved splen- 
didly, standing firm, and in a few seconds the hne was 
restored. 

As Curtis broke through, Delaney, a brawny Irishman stand- 
ing next to him, started to follow. He took one step. At the 
same instant Limber Jim's long legs took three great strides, 
and placed him directly in front of Delaney. Jim's right hand 
held an enormous bowie-knife, and as he raised it above 
Delaney he hissed out : 

" H you dare move another step, you , I'U 

open you from one end to the other." 



248 X AKDEKSONVILLE. 

Delaney stopped. This checked the others till our lines 
reformed. 

When TVirz saw the commotion he was panic-stricken with 
fear that the long-dreaded assault on the Stockade had begun. 
He ran down from the headquarter steps to the Captain of the 
battery, shrieking 

"Fire! fire! fire!" 

The Captain, not being a fool, could see that the rush vf as not 
towards the Stockade, but away from it, and he refrained from 
giving the order. 

But the spectators who had gotten before the guns, heard 
"Wirz's excited yell, and remembering the consequences to them- 
selves should the artillery be discharged, became frenzied with 
fear, and screamed, and fell down over and trampled upon each 
other in endeavoring to get away. The guards on that side of 
the Stockade ran down in a panic, and the ten thousand pris- 
oners immediately around us, expecting no less than that the 
next instant we would be swept Avith grape and canister, stam- 
peded tumultuously. There were quite a number of wells right 
around us, and all of these were filled full of men that fell into 
them as the crowd rushed away. Many had legs and arms bro- 
ken, and I have no doubt that several were killed. 

It was the stormiest five minutes that I ever saw. 

While this was going on two of my company, belonging to 
the Fifth Iowa Cavalry, were in hot pursuit of Curtis. I had 
seen them start and shouted to them to come back, as I feared 
they would be set upon by the Eaiders and murdered. But 
the din was so overpowering that they could not hear me, and 
doubtless would not have come back if they had heard. 

Curtis ran diagonally down the hill, jumping over the tents 
and knocking down the men who happened in his way. Arriv- 
ing at the swamp he plunged in, sinking nearly to his hips in 
the fetid, filthy ooze. He forged his way through with terrible 
effort. His pursuers followed his example, and caught up to 
him just as he emerged on the other side. They struck him on 
the back of the head with their clubs, and knocked him down. 

By this time order had been restored about us. The guns 
remained silent, and the crowd massed around us again. From 
where we were we could see the successful end of the chase 



A 8T0KT OF REBEL MILITAKY PKISONS. 249 

after Curtis, and could see his captors start back with him. 
Their success was announced with a roar of applause from the 
North Side. Both captors and captured were greatly ex- 
hausted, and they were coming back very slowly. Key ordered 
the balance up on to the scafTold. They obeyed promptly. 
The priest resumed his reading of the service for the condemned. 
The excitement seemed to make the doomed ones exceedingly 
thirsty. I never saw men drink such inordinate quantities of 
water. They called for it continually, gulped down a quart or 
more at a time, and kept two men going nearly all the time 
carrying it to them. 

"When Curtis finally arrived, he sat on the ground for a min- 
ute or so, to rest, and then, reeking with filth, slowly and pain- 
fully climbed the steps. Delaney seemed to think he was 
suffering as much from fright as anything else, and said to 
him : 

" Come on up, now, show yourself a man, and die game." 

Again the priest resumed his reading, but it had no interest 
to Delaney, who kept calling out directions to I^ete Donelly, 
who was standing in the crowd, as to dispositions to be made 
of certain bits of stolen property : to give a watch to this one, 
a ring to another, and so on. Once the priest stopped and 
said: 

" My son, let the things of this earth go, and turn your atten- 
tion toward those of heaven." 

Delaney paid no attention to this admonition. The whole 
six then began delivering farewell messages to those in the 
crowd. Key pulled a w^atch from his pocket and said : 

" Two minutes more to talk." 

Delaney said cheerfully : 

" Well, good by, b'ys ; if I've hurted any of yez, I hope ye'li 
forgive me. Shpake up, now, any of yez that I've hurted, and 
say ye'll forgive me." 

We called upon Marion Friend, whose throat Delaney had 
tried to cut three weeks before while robbing him of forty 
dollars, to come forward, but Friend was not in a forgiving 
mood, and refused with an oath. 

Key said : 

"Tune's up I" 



250 AOTDEESONVILLE. 

put the watch back in his pocket and raised his hand like an 
officer commanding a gun. Harris and Payne laid hold of the 
ropes to the supports of the planks. Each of the six hangmen 
tied a condemned man's hands, pulled a meal sack down over 
his head, placed the noose around his neck, drew it up tolerably 
close, and sprang to the ground. The priest began praying 
aloud. 

Key dropped his hand. Payne and Harris snatched the sup- 
ports out with a single jerk. The [planks fell with a clatter. 
Five of the bodies swung around dizzily in the air. The sixth 
— that of "Mosby," a large, powerful, raw-boned man, one of 
the worst in the lot, and who, among other crimes, had killed 
Limber Jim's brother — broke the rope, and fell with a thud to 
the ground. Some of the men ran forward, examined the 
body, and decided that he still hved. The rope was cut off his 
neck, the meal sack removed, and water thrown in his face until 
consciousness returned. At the first instant he thought he was 
in eternity. He gasped out : 

" "Where am I ? Am I in the other world ? " 

Limber Jim muttered that they would soon show him where 
he was, and went on grimly fixing up the scaffold anew. 
" Mosby " soon realized what had happened, and the unrelent- 
ing purpose of the Regulator Chiefs. Then he began to beg 
piteously for his life, saying : 

" O for God's sake, do not put me up there again ! God has 
spared my life once. He meant that you should be merciful 
to me." 

Limber Jim deigned him no reply. "When the scaffold was 
re-arranged, and a stout rope had replaced the broken one, he 
pulled the meal sack once more over " Mosby's " head, who 
never ceased his pleadings. Then picking up the large man as 
if he were a baby, he carried him to the scaffold and handed 
him up to Tom Larkin, who fitted the noose around his neck 
and sprang down. The supports had not been set with the 
same delicacy as at first, and Limber Jim had to set his heel 
and wrench desperately at them before he could force them 
out. Then " Mosby " passed away without a struggle. 

After hanging till life was extinct, the bodies were cut down, 
the mealsacks pulled off their faces, and the Eegulators formed 



A STORY OF REBEL MILITARY PRISONS. 251 

two parallel lines, through which all the prisoners passed and 
took a look at the bodies. Pete Donnelly and Dick Allen kndt 
do^vn and wiped the froth off Delaney's lips, and swore Yen- 
geance against those who had done him to death. 



CHAPTER XXXYIIL 

AFTEE THE EXECUTION — FORMATION OF A POLICE FORCE ITS 

FIRST CHIEF " SPANKING " AN OFFENDER. 

After the executions Key, knowing that he, and all those promi- 
nently connected with the hanging, would be in hourly danger 
of assassination if they remained inside, socured details as 
nurses and ward-masters in the hospital, and went outside. In 
this crowd were Key, Ned Carrigan, Limber Jim, Dick 
McCuUough, the six hangmen, the two Corporals who pulled 
the props from under the scaffold, and perhaps some others 
whom I do not now remember. 

In the meanwhile provision had been made for the future 
maintenance of order in the prison by the organization of a 
regular police force, which in time came to number twelve 
hundred men. These were divided into companies, under 
appropriate officers. Guards were detailed for certain loca- 
tions, patrols passed through the camp in all directions contin- 
ually, and signals with whistles could summon sufficient assist- 
ance to suppress any disturbance, or carry out any orders from 
the chief. 

The chieftainship was first held by Key, but when he went 
outside he appointed Sergeant A. R. Ilill, of the One Hun- 
dredth O. Y. I. — now a resident of TVauseon, Ohio, — his suc- 
cessor. Hill was one of the notabilities of that immense 
throng. A great, broad-shouldered giant, in the prime of hib 
manhood — the beginning of his thirtieth year — he was as 
good-natured as big, and as mUd-niannered as brave. He 
spoke slowly, softly, and with a slightly rustic twang, that was 
very tempting to a certain class of sharps to take him up for a 



A STOKY OF KEI3EL ItllLITAKY PRISONS. 



253 



" lubberly greeny." The man who did so usually repented his 

error in sack-cloth and ashes. 

Hill first came into prominence as the victor in the most 

stubbornly contested fight in the prison historj^ of Belle Isle. 

-When the 
squad of the 
One II u n - 
dredth Ohio 
— captured at 
Limestone Sta- 
tion, East Ten- 
nessee, in Sep- 
tember, 1863— 
arrived on 
Belle Isle, a 
certain Jack 
I Oliver, of the 
I^ineteenth In- 
' diana, was the 
undisputed 
fistic monarch 
of the Island. 
He did not 
bear his blush- 
^^^ inff honors 

SEEGEANT A. R. HILL, IOOtH O. T. T. i ,, o 

' modestly ; few 

Kings of Muscle can, or do. The possession of a right arm 
capable of knocking an ordinary man into that indefinite 
locality known as "the middle of next week," is something 
that the possessor can as little resist showing as can a girl 
her first solitaire ring. To know that one can certainl}'' 
strike a disagreeable fellow out of time is pretty sure to breed 
a desire to do that thing whenever occasion serves. Jack 
Oliver was one who did not let his biceps rust in inaction, 
but thrashed everybody on the Island whom he thought 
needed it, and his ideas as to those who should be included 
in this class widened daily, until it began to appear that he 
would soon feel it his duty to let no unwhipped man escape, 
but pound everybody on the Island. 




254 JLNDEE80NVILLE. 

One day his evil genius led him to abuse a rather elderly man 
belonging to Hill's mess. As he fired off his tirade of con- 
tumely, HlU said with more than his usual " soft " rusticity : 

"Mister — I — don't — think — it — just — right — for — a — 
young — man — to — call — an — old — one — such — bad — 
names." 

Jack Ohver turned on him savagely. 

" Well ! may be you want to take it up ? " 

The grin on Hill's face looked still more verdant, as he 
answered with gentle deliberation : 

" Well — mister — I — don't — go — around — a — himtiug — 
things — but — I — gineraUy — take — care — of — all — that's 
— sent — me!" 

Jack foamed, but his fiercest bluster could not drive that 
infantile smile from Hill's face, nor provoke a change in the 
cahn slowness of his speech. 

It was evident that nothing would do but a battle-royal, and 
Jack had sense enough to see that the imperturbable rustic was 
hkely to give him a job of some diificulty. He went off and 
came back with his clan, while Hill's comrades of the One 
Hundredth gathered around to insure him fair play. Jack 
pulled off his coat and vest, rolled up his sleeves, and mad© 
other elaborate preparations for the affray. Hill, without 
removing a garment, said, as he surveyed him with a mocking 
smile : 

" Mister — you — seem — to — be — one — of — them — par- 
tick — e — ler — fellers." 

Jack roared out, 

" By , I'll make you particJceler before I get tlirough with 

you. Now, how shall we settle this? Regular stand-up-and. 
knock-down, or rough and tumble ? " 

If anything Hill's face was more vacantly serene, and his 
tones blander than ever, as he answered : 

" Strike — any — gait — that — suits — you, — Mister ; — I — 
guess — I — -will — be — able — to — keep — *up — with — you.'* 

They closed. Hill feinted with his left, and as Jack uncov- 
ered to guard, he caught him fairly on the lower left ribs, by a 
blow from his mighty right fist, that sounded — as one of the 
by-standers expressed it — "like striking a hollow log with a 
maul." 



A STORY OF REBEL MILITAKY PRISONS. 255 

The color in Jack's face paled. lie did not seem to under- 
stand how he had hiid himself open to such a pass, and made 
the same mistake, receiying again a sonnding blow in the short 
ribs. This taught him nothing, either, for again he opened his 
guard in response to a feint, and again canght a blow on his 
luckless left ribs, that drove the blood from his face and the 
breath from his body. He reeled back among his supporters for 
an instant to breathe. Eecovering his wind, he dashed at Ililb 
feinted strongly with his right, but delivered a terrible kick 
against the lower part of the latter's abdomen. J3oth closed 
and fought savagely at half -arm's length for an instant, during 
which Hill struck Jack so fairly in the mouth as to brealv out 
three fi'ont teeth, which the latter swallowed. Then they 
clenched and struggled to throw each other. Hill's superior 
strength and skill crushed his opponent to the ground, and he 
fell upon him. As they grappled there, one of Jack's followers 
sought to aid his leader by catching Hill by the hair, intending 
to kick him in the face. In an instant he was knocked down 
by a stalwart member of the One Hundredth, and then hterally 
lifted out of the ring by kicks. 

Jack was soon so badly beaten as to be unable to cry 
"enough!" One of his friends did that service for him, the 
fight ceased, and thenceforth Mr. Oliver resigned his pugilistic 
crown, and retired to the shades of private life. He died of 
scurvy and diarrhea, some months afterwp,rd, in Andersonville. 

The almost hourly scenes of violence and crime that marked 
the days and nights before the Eegulators began operations were 
now succeeded by the greatest order. The prison was freer 
from crime than the best governed Gity. There were frequent 
squabbles and fights, of course, and many petty larcenies. Ra- 
tions of bread and of wood, articles of clothing, and the 
wretched little cans and half canteens that formed our cooldnir 
utensils, were still stolen, but all these were in a sneak-thief 
way. There was an entire absence of the audacious open-day 
robbery and murder — the "raiding" of the previous few 
weeks. The summary punishment iniiicted on the condemned 
was sufficient to cow even bolder men than the Raiders, and 
they were frightened into at least quiescence. 

Sergeant IliU's administration was vigorous, and secured Um. 



256 



ANDERSONVILLE. 



best results. lie became a judge of all infractions of morals 
and law, and sat at the door of his tent to dispense justice to all 
comers, hke the Cadi of a Mahometan Tillage. His judicial 
methods and punishments also reminded one strongly of the 
primitive judicature of Oriental lands. The Avi'onged one came 
before him and told his tale : he had his blouse, or his quart 
cup, or his shoes, or his watch, or his money stolen during the 
night. The suspected one was also summoned, confronted with 
his accuser, and sharply interrogated. Hill would revolve the 
stories in his mmd, decide the innocence or guilt of the accused, 
and if he thought the accusation sustained, order the culprit to 
punishment. He did not imitate his Mussulman prototypes to 
the extent of bowstringing or decapitating the condemned, nor 
did he cut any thief's hands off, nor yet nail his ears to a door- 
post, but he introduced a modification of the bastinado that 

made those who were punished 
by it even wish they were dead. 
The instrument used was what is 
called in the South a " shake " -V 
a split shingle, a yard or more^ 
long, and with one end whittled 
down to form a handle. The 
cul])rit was made to bend down 
until he could catch around his 
ankles with his hands. The part 
of the body thus brought into 
most prominence was denuded o:^ 
clothing and "spanked" from 
one to twenty times, as Hill 
ordered, by the " shake " in some 
strong and willing hand. It was 
very amusing — to the bystand 
ers. ' The "spankee" never seem 
to enter very heartily into t 
■' M-^-^'^'^" " A '^""^p- mirth of the occasion. As a rme 

he slejjt on his IVx-e for a week or so after, and took his meals 
standing. 

The icar of the spanking, and Hill's skill in detecting the 
.guilt}^ ones, had a very salutary effect upon the smaller criminals. 




JL 8T0BT OF REBEL MELITAItT PEI80N8. 257 

The Eaiders "who had been put into irons were very restive 
under the infliction, and begged Hill daily to release them. 
They professed the greatest penitence, and promised the most 
exemplary behavior for the future. Hill refused to release 
them, declaring that they should wear the irons until delivered 
up to our Government. 

One of the Eaiders — named Heffron — had, shortly after his 
arrest, turned State's evidence, and given testimony that assisted 
materially in the conviction of his companions. One morning, 
a "week or so after the hanging, his body was found lying among 
the other dead at the South Gate. The impression made b}'' the 
fingers of the hand that had strangled him, were still plainly 
visible about the throat. There was no doubt as to why he had 
been kiUed, or that the Eaiders were his miirderers, but the 
actual perpetrators were never discovered. 
17 



CHAPTEK XXXIX. 

jrmLY THE PRISON BECOMES MOKE CROWDED, THE "WEATHER HOTTER, 

RATIONS POORER, AND MORTALITY GREATER SOME OF THE PHB- 

ITOMENA OF SUFFERING AND DEATH. 

All during July the prisoners came streaming in by hundreds 
and thousands from every portion of the long line of battle, 
stretching from the Eastern bank of the Mississippi to the 
shores of the Atlantic. Over one thousand squandered by 
Sturgis at Guntown came in ; two thousand of those captm-ed 
in the desperate blow dealt by Hood against the Army of the 
Tennessee on the 2 2d of the month before Atlanta ; hundreds 
from Ilunter's luckless colmnn in the Shenandoah Yalley, thou- 
sands from Grant's lines in front of Petersburg. In all, seven 
thousand one hundred and twenty-eight were, during the 
month, turned into that seething mass of corrupting humanity 
to be polluted and tainted by it, and to assist in turn to maJie 
it fouler and deadlier. Over seventy hecatombs of chosen vic- 
tims — of fair youths in the hi'st flush of hopeful manhood, at 
the threshold of a life of honor to themselves and of useful- 
ness to the commimity; beardless boys, rich in the priceless 
affections of homes, fathers, mothers, sisters and sw^eethearts, 
with minds thrilling with high aspirations for the bright 
future, were sent in as the monthly sacrifice to this Minotaur 
of the HebelHon, who, couched in his foul lau*, slew them, not 
with the merciful delivery of speedy death, as liis Cretan 
prototype did the annual tribute of Athenian youths and maidens, 
but, gloating over his jjrey, doomed them to lingering destruc- 
tion. He rotted then* flesh Avith the scurvy, racked their minds 



A BTOBT OF KBBEL MILITAKY PRISONS. 269 

with intolerable suspense, burned tbeir bodies with the sIoa? lire 
of famine, and dehghted in each separate pang, until they 
sank beneath the fearful accumulation. Theseus — the de- 
hverer — was coming. His terrible sword could be seen gleam- 
ing as it rose and fell on the banks of the James, and in the 
mountains beyond Atlanta, where he was hemng his way 
towards them and the heart of the Southern Confederacy. But 
he came too late to save them. Strike as swiftly and as heavily 
as he would, he could not strike so hard nor so sure at his foes 
with saber blow and musket shot, as they could at the haples 
youths with the dreadful armament of starvation and disease.' 
Though the deaths were one thousand eight hundred and 
seventeen — more than were killed at the battle of Shiloh — this 
left the number in the prison at the end of the month thirty-one . 
thousand six hundred and seventy-eight. Let me assist the 
reader's comprehension of the magnitude of this number by 
giving the population of a few important Cities, according to 
the census of 1870 : 

Cambridge, M«8S 39,639 

Charleston, S. C 48,956 

Charleetown, Mass 28,323 

Columbus, 31,274 

Dayton, 30,473 

Fall River, Mass 26,rG0 

Hartford, Conn 37,180 

Kansas City, Mo 32,260 

Lawrence, Mass 23,921 

Lynn, Mass 28,233 

Memphis, Tenn 40,366 

Mobile, Ala 32,034 

Paterson, N. J 33,579 

Portland, Me -31,413 

Reading, Pa 33,930 

Savannah, Ga ...23,223 

Syracuse, N. Y/ 43,051 

Toledo, O 31,584 

Utica, N. Y :..28,804 

Wilmington, Del SO,S40 

The number of prisoners exceeded the whole number of men 
between the ages of eighteen and forty-five in several of the 



260 AKDERSONVILLE. 

States and Territories in the Union. Here, for instance, are 
the returns for 1870, of men of military age in sc^e portions 
of the country : 

Arizona .. . . ....... ................. ...... 6,157 

Colorado 15,158 

Dakota 5,301 

Florida 34,539 

Idaho 9,431 

Montana 12,418 

Nebraska 35,6T7 

Nevada 24,762 

New nampsliire ^ 60,684 

Oregon 23,S59 

Rhode Island 44,377 

Vermont G2,450 

West Virginia 76,832 

It was more soldiers than could be raised to-day, under strong 
pressure, in either Alabama, Arizona, Arlvansas, California, 
Colorado, Connecticut, Dakota, Delaware, District of Columbia, 
Florida, Idaho, Louisiana, Maine, Minnesota, Montana, Nebras- 
ka, JS'evada, 'New Hampshire, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode 
Igiand, South Carolina, Utah, Vermont or West Yirginia. 
jT These thirty-one thousand six hundred and seventy-eight 
/ active young men, who were likely to find the confines of a 
y State too narrow for them, were cooped up on thirteen acres 
\of ground — less than a farmer gives for play-ground for a half 
dozen colts or a small flock of sheep. There was hardly room 
for all to lie down at night, and to walk a few hundred feet in 
any direction would require an hour's patient threading of the 
mass of men and tents. 

The weather became hotter and hotter ; at midday the sand 
would burn the hand. The thin skins of fair and auburn-haired 
men blistered under the sun's rays, and swelled up in great 
watery puffs, which soon became the breeding grounds of the 
hideous maggots, or the still more deadly gangrene. The 
loathsome swamp grew in rank offensiveness with every burn- 
ing hour. The pestilence literally stalked at noon-day, and 
struck his victims down on every hand. One could not look a 
rod in any direction without seeing at least a dozen men in the 
last frightful stages of rotting Death. 



A 8TOET OF KEBKL MTLITAKT PKIS0N9. 



261 




Let me describe the scene immediately around my ovirn tent 
daring the last two -weeks of July, as a sample of the con- 
^ dition of the Avhole prison : I will tak^ a 

space not larger than a good sized parlor or 
sitting room. On th>s were at least fifty 
of us. Directly in front of me lay two 
brothers — named Sherwood — belonging to 
Company I, of my battalion, who came 
originally from Missouri. They were now 
in the last stages of scurvy and diarrhea. 
Every particle of muscle and fat about 
their limbs and bodies had apparently 
wasted away, leaving the skin chnging 
close to the bone of the face, arms, hands, 
ribs and thighs — everywhere except the 
feet and legs, where it was swollen tense 
and transparent, distended with gallons of 
purulent matter. Their livid gums, from 
which most of their teeth had already 
fallen, protruded far beyond their lips. To 
their left lay a Sergeant and tw^o others of 
their company, ail three slowlj'^ dying from 
diarrhea, and beyond was a fair-haired. German, young and 
intelligent looking, Avhose life was ebbing tediously away. 
To my right was a handsome 3''oung Sergeant of an Illinois 
Infantry Regiment, captured at Ivenesaw. His left arm had 
been amputated between the shoulder and elbow, and he 
was turned into the Stockade Avith the stump all undressed, 
save the ligating of the arteries. Of course, he had not been 
inside an hour until the maggot Hies had laid eggs in the open 
wound, and before the day was gone the worms were hatched 
out, and rioting amid the inflamed and super-sensitive nerves, 
where their every motion was agony. Accustomed as we 
were to misery, we found a still lower depth in his misfortune, 
and I would be happier could I forget his pale, drawn face, as 
he wandered uncomplainingly to and fro, holding his maimed 
limb with his right hand, occasionally stopping to squeeze it, ns 
one does a boil, and press from it a stream of maggots and pus. 
I do not think he ate or slept for a week before he died. >Jext 



IBjB wounded ILLINOIS 8ER 
GEAHT. 



262 jlndkesojtvillk. 

to him staid an Irish Sergeant of a 'Nqw York Regiment, a fine 
soldierly man, who, with pardonable pride, wore, conspicuously 
on his left breast, a medal gained b}^ gallantry while a British 
soldier in the Crimea. He was wasting away with diarrhea, 
and died before the month was ont. 

This was what one could see on every square rod of the 
prison. Where I was was not only no worse than the rest of 
the prison, but was probably much better and healthier, as it 
was the highest ground inside, farthest from the Swamp, and 
having the dead line on two sides, had a ventilation that those 
nearer the center could not possibly have. Yet, with all these 
conditions in our favor, the mortality was as I have described. 

Near us an exasperating idiot, 
who played the flute, had 
established himself. Like all 
poor plaj^ers, he affected the 
low, mournful notes, as plaint- 
ive as the distant cooing of the 
dove in lowering weather. He 
; "X^^, plaj^ed or rather tooted away 

fe . v • %\ in his '' blues "-inducing? strain 

C'" "\ '' !>-' ',^- \ " 

1^7^:^ V -'.'iS hour after hour, des])ite our 

<:^j^^ sc-^ T,, energetic protests, ana occa- 

■^^-^p? x^ -T-^^i sional fling of a club at him. 

^'^ ^^^-L^- -^*l^^.i^ -^^ There was no more stoi:> to him 

-^-^<l>i than to a man with a hand- 




Tun IDIl^TlC FLUTE-ri.AYi;U. 



organ, and to this day the low, 
sad notes of a flute are the swiftest reminder to me of those 
sorrowful, death-laden da^^s. 

I had an illustration one morning of how far decomposition 

would progress in a man's body before he died. My cimm and 

I found a treasnre-trove in the streets, in the shape of the bodj^ 

of a man who died dm-ing the niglit. The value of this " find " 

/^as that if -^ve took it to the gate, we would be allowed to 

/ carry it outside to the deadhouse, and on our way back have an 

/ opportunity to pick up a chunk of wood, to use in cooking. 

I While discussing our good luck another party came up and 

\ claimed the body. A verbal dispute led to one of blows, in 

\ which we came off victorious, and I hastily caught hold of the 



A 8TOBY OF EEBEL MILITARY PBI80N8. 268 

arm near the elbow to help bear the body away. The skin gave 
way under my hand, and slipped with it down to the wrist, like 
a torn sleeve. It was sickening, but I clung to my prize, and 
secured a very good chunk of wood while outside with it. The 
wood was very much needed by my mess, as our squad had 
then had none for more than a week. 



CTIAPTEK XL. 

THE BATTI.E OF THE 22d OF JULY THE ARMT OF THE TEJTNESSEK 

ASSAULTED FRONT AJ«rD REAR DEATH OF GENERAL MCPHERSON 

A68U]VirnON OF C050IAND BY GENERAL LOGAN RESULT OF 

THE BA'HLE. 

Naturally, we had a consuming hunger for news of what 
was being accomplished by our armies toward crushing the 
Rebellion, Kow, more than ever, had we reason to ardently 
wish for the destruction of the Rebel power. Before capture 
we had love of country and a natural desire for the triumph of 
her flag to animate us. Now we had a hatred of the Rebels 
that passed expression, and a fierce longing to see those who 
daily tortm-ed and insulted us trampled down in the dust of 
huniihation. 

The daily arrival of prisoners kept us tolerably well informed 
as to the general progress of the campaign, and we added to 
the information thus obtained by getting — almost daily — in 
some manner or another — a copy of a Rebel paper. Most fre- 
quently these were Atlanta papers, or an issue of the " Memphis- 
Corinth- Jaclcson-Grenada-Chattanooga-Resacca-Marietta- Atlan- 
ta Ajrpeal" as they used to facetiously term a Memphis paper 
that left that City when it was taken in 18G2, and for twoyeare 
•fell back from place to place, as Sherman's Army advanced, 
until at last it gave up the struggle in September, 18G4, in 
a little Town south of Atlanta, after about two thousand miles 
of weary retreat from an indefatigable pursuer. The papers 
were brought in by " fresh fish," purchased from the guards 
at from fifty cents to one dollar apiece, or occasionally thrown 
in to us when they had some specially disagreeable iatelligence, 



A 8TORT OF REBEL MLLITAKY PRISOM8. 2G5 

like the defeat of Banks, or Sturgis, or Ilunter, to exult over. 
I was particularly fortunate in getting hold of these. Beconi- 
ing installed as general reader for a neighborhood of several 
thousand men, everything of this kind was immediately brought 
to me, to be read aloud for the benefit of everybody. All the 
older prisoners knew me by the nick-name of "Illinoy" — a 
designation arising from my wearing on my cap, wlien I 
entered prison, a neat little white metal badge of " Ills." "When 
any reading matter was brought into our neighborhood, there 
would be a general cry of 

" Take it up to ' Illinoy,' " 
and then hundreds would mass around my quarters to b ear the 
news read. 

The Rebel papers usually had very meager reports of the 
operations of the armies, and these were greatly distorted, but 
they were still very interesting, and as we always started in to 
read with the expectation that the whole statement was a mass- 
of perversions and lies, where truth was an infrequent accident, 
we were not lil^ely to be much impressed with it. 

There was a marked diiference in the tone of the reports 
brought in from the different armies. Sherman's men were 
always sanguine. They had no doubt that they were ])n hing 
the enemy straight to the wall, and that everv day brought the 
Southern Confederacy much nearer its downfall. Those from. 
the Army of the Potomac were never so hopeful. They would 
admit that Grant was pounding Lee terribly, but the sliadow of 
the frequent defeats of the Army of the Potomac seemed to 
hang depressingiy over them. 

There came a day, however, when our sanguine hopes as ta 
Sherman were checked by a possibility that he had failed; that 
his long campaign towards Atlanta had culminated in such a 
reverse under the very walls of the City as would compel an 
abandonment of the enterprise, and possibly a humdiating 
retreat. We knew that Jeff. Davis and his Governinent were 
strongly dissatisfied with the Fabian policy of Joe Johnston. 
The papers had told us of the Rebel President's visit to 
Atlanta, of his bitter comments on Johnston's tactics ; of his 
going so far as to sneer about the necessity of providing pon- 
toons at Key West, so that Johnston might continue his retreat 



266 Al-TDEKSOKVILLE. 

even to Cuba. Then came the ne>vs of Johnston's supersession 
by Hood, and the papers were full of the exulting predictions 
of what would now be accomplished " when that gallant young 
soldier is once fairly in the saddle." 

All this meant one supreme effort to arrest the onward course 
of Sherman. It indicated a resolve to stake the fate of Atlanta, 
and the fortunes of the Confederacy in the AYest, upon the 
hazard of one desperate fight. We watched the summoning up 
of every Rebel energy for the blow with apprehension. We 
di'eaded another Chickamauga. 

The blow fell on the 22d of July. It was well planned. The 
Army of the Tennessee, the left of Sherman's forces, was the 
part struck. On the night of the 21st Ilood marched a heavy 
force around its left flank and gained its rear. On the 22d thia 
force fell on the rear with the impetuous violence of a cyclone, 
while the Rebels in the works immediately around Atlanta 
attacked furiously in front. 

It was an ordeal that no other army ever passed through 
success full}^ The steadiest troops in Europe would think it 
foolhardiness to attempt to withstand an assault in force in 
front and rear at the same time. The finest legions that follow 
any flag to-day must almost inevitably succumb to such a mode 
of atta-ck. But the seasoned veterans of the Array of the Ten- 
nessee encountered the shock with an obstinacy which showed 
that the finest material for soldiery this planet holds was 
that in which undaunted h earts beat beneath blue blouses. Spring- 
ing over the front of their breastworks, they drove back with 
a withering fire the force assailing them in the rear. This 
beaten off, they jumped back to their proper places, and 
repulsed the assault in front. This was the way the battle was 
waged untfl night compelled a cessation of operations. Our 
boys were alternately behind the breastworks firing at Rebels 
advancing upon the front, and in front of the works firing upon 
those coming up in the rear. Sometimes part of our line would 
be on one side of the works, and part on the other. 

In the prison we were greatly excited over the result of the 
engagement, of which we were uncertain for many days. 
A host of new prisoners — perhaps two thousand — was brought 
in from there, but as they were captured during the progress of 



A 8T0ET OF KEBEL. MTLTTAHY PKISONS. 267 

the fight, they could not speak definitely as to its issue. The 
Rebel papers exulted without stint over what they termed " a 
glorious victory." They were particularly jubilant over the 
death of McPherson, who, they claimed, was the brain and 
guiding hand of Sherman's army. One paper likened him to 
the pilot-fish, which guides the shark to his prey. ISTow that 
he was gone, said the paper, Sherman's army" becomes a great 
lumbering hullv, with no one in it capable of directing it, and 
it must soon fall to utter ruin under the sirilfully delivered 
strokes of the gallant Hood. 

We also knew that great numbers of wounded had been 
brought to the prison hospital, and this seemed to confirm the 
Rebel claim of a victory, as it showed they retained possession 
of the battle field. 

About the 1st of August a large squad of Sherman's men, 
captured in one of the engagements subsequent to the 22d, came 
in. "We gathered around them ea2;erly. Among them I noticed 
a bright, curly-haired, blue-eyed infantryman — or boy, rather, 
as he was yet beardless. His cap was marked " 68th O. V. V. 
I.," his sleeves were garnished with re-enlistment stripes, and on 
the breast of his blouse was a silver arrow. To the eye of the 
soldier this said that he was a veteran member of the Sixty-Eighth 
Regiment of Ohio Infantry (that is, having already served 
three years, he had re-enlisted for the war), and that he belonged 
to the Third Division of the Seventeenth Army Corps. He 
was so young and fresh looking that one could hardly believe 
him to be a veteran, but if his stripes had not said this, 
the soldierly arrangement of clothing and accoutrements, and 
the graceful, self-possessed pose of limbs and body would have 
told the observer that he was one of those " Old Reliables" with 
whom Sherman and Grant had already subdued a third of the 
Confederacy. His blanket, which, for a wonder, t'le Rebels had 
neglected to take from him, was tightly rolled, its ends tied 
together, and thrown over his shoulder scarf-fashion. His 
pantaloons were tucked inside his stocking tops, that were 
pulled up as far as possible, and tied tightly around his ankle 
with a string. A none-too-clean haversack, containing the 
inevitable sooty quart cup, and even blackei* half-canteen, was 
elung easily from the shoulder opposite to that on which the 



S6d 



AlfDKUSO>JVlLi.K 




fii 



J 



V 



blanket rested. Hand him his faithful Springfield rifie, put 
three days' rations in his haversack, and forty rounds in his 
cartridge box, and he would be ready, without an instant's 

demur or question, to march 
to the ends of the earth, and 
fight anything that crossed 
his path. He was a type of 
the honest, honorable, self- 
respecting American boy, who, 
as a soldier, the world has not 
equaled in the sixty centuries 
that war has been a profession. 
I suggested to him that he 
was rather a youngster to be 
wearing veteran chevrons. 

" Yes," said he, " I am not 
so old as some of the rest of 
the boys, but I have seen 
about as much service and 
been in the business about as 
long as any of them. They 
call me ' Old Dad,' I suppose 
because I was the youngest 
boy in the Regiment, when 
we first entered the service, 
though our whole Company, 
officers and all, were only a lot of boys, and the Regiment to 
day, what's left of 'em, are about as young a lot of oilScers and 
men as there are in the service. Why, our old Colonel ain't 
only twenty -four years old now, and he has been in command ever 
since we went into Vicksburg. I have heard it said by our 
boys that since we veteranized the whole Regiment, officers, 
and men, average less than twenty-four years old. But they 
are grayhounds to march and stayers in a fight, you bet. Why, 
the rest of the troops over in "West Tennessee used to call our 
Brigade ' Leggett's Cavalry,' for they always had us chasing 
Old Forrest, and we kept him skedaddhng, too, pretty hvely. 
But I tell you we did get into a red hot scrimmage on the 
22d. It just laid over Champion Hills, or any of the big fights 







ONK or Sherman's " vdterans." 



A BTOET OF EEBEL MILITAKT PEIfiONS. 269 

aroimd Yicksburg, and they were lively enough to amuse any 
one." 

" So you were in the affair on the 22d, were you ? "V7e are 
awful anxious to hear all about it. Come over here to my quar- 
ters and tell us all you know. All we know is that there has 
been a big fight, with McPherson Idlled, and a heavy loss of 
life besides, and the Eebels claim a great victory." 

" O, they bo . It was the sickest victory they ever got. 

About one more victory of that kmd would make their infernal 
old Confederacy ready for a coroner's inquest. AVell, I can tell 
you pretty much all about that fight, for I reckon if the truth 
was known, our regiment fired about the first and last shot that 
opened and closed the fighting on that day. "Well, you see the 
whole Army got across the river, and were closing in around the 
City of Atlanta. Our Corps, the Seventeenth, was the extreme 
left of the army, and were moving up toward the City from the 
East. The Fifteenth (Logan's) Corps joined us on the right, 
then the Army of the Cumberland furtlier to the right. We 
run onto the Kebs about sundown the 21st. They had 
some breastworks on a ridge in front of us, and we had a pretty 
sharp fight before we drove them off. "VVe went right to work, 
and kept at it all night in changing and strengthening the old 
Rebel barricades, fronting them towards Atlanta, and by morn- 
ing had some good solid works along our whole line. During 
the night we fancied we could hear wagons or artillery moving 
away in front of us, apparently going South, or towards our 
left. About three or four o'clock in the morning, while I was 
shoveling dirt like a beaver out on the works, the Lieutenant 
came to me and said the Colonel wanted to see me, pointmg to 
a large tree in the rear, where I could find him. I reported and 
found him Avith General Leggett, who commanded our DiAision, 
talking mighty serious, and Bob Wheeler, of F Company, 
standing there with his Springfield at a parade rest. As soon 
as I came up, the Colonel says : 

'"Boys, the General wants two levd-headed chaps to go out 
beyond the pickets to the front and toward the left. I have 
selected you for the duty. Go as quietly as possible and as fast 
as you can ; keep your eyes and ears open ; don't fire a shot if 
you can help it, and come back and tell us exactly what you 



270 



AJfDEKSONVILLK. 



liave seen and heard, and not what you imagine or suspect. I 
have selected you for the duty.' 

"lie gave its the countersign, and off we started over the 
breastworks and through the thick woods. We soon came to 
our skirmish or pickets, only a few rods in front of our works, 
and cautioned them not to fire on us in going or returning. "We 
went out as much as half a mile or more, until we could plainly 
hear the sound of wagons and artillery. AYe then cautiously 
crept forward until we could see the main road leading south 
from the City filled with marching men, artillery and teams. 
We could hear the commands of the officers and see the fiags 
and banners of regiment after regiment as they passed us. 
We got back quietly and quickly, passed through our picket 
line all right, and found the General and our Colonel sitting on 
a log where we had left them, waiting for us. We reported 
what we had seen and heard, and gave it as our opinion 

that the Johnnies were 
evacuating At 1 a n t a . 
The General shook his 
head, and the Colonel 
says: 'You may re- 
turn to your company.' 
Bob says to me : 

"'The old General 
shakes his head as 
though he thought them 
d — d Rebs ain't evacu- 
ating Atlanta so mighty 
sudden, but are up to 
some 

I ain't sure 
right. Tliey aint going 
to keep f aUing back and 
falling back to all eter- 
nity, but are just agoin' to give us a rip-roaring great big fight 
one o' these days — when they get a good ready. You hear me ! ' 
" Saying which we both went to our companies, and laid down 
to get a little sleep. It was about daylight then, and I must 
have snoozed away until near noon, when I heard the order 




devilment agam. 
but he's 



TOU IIEAIi ME, 



A STOEY OF EEBEL MILITaVBY PKISONS. 271 

' fall in I ' and found the regiment getting into line, and the boys 
all talking about going right into Atlanta; that the Eebelshad 
evacuated the City duinng the night, and that we were going 
to have a race with the Fifteenth Corps as to which would get 
into the City first. We could look away out across a large 
field in front of our works, and see the skirmish line advancing 
steadily towards the main Avorks around the City. Kot a shot 
was being fired on either side. 

" To our surprise, instead of marching to the front and toward 
the City, we filed off into a small road cut through the woods 
and marched rapidly to the rear. "We could not understand 
what it meant. AVe marched at quick time, feeling pretty mad 
that we had to go to the rear, when the rest of our Division 
were going into Atlanta. 

" We passed the Sixteenth Corps lying on their arms, back 
in some open fields, and the wagon trains of our Corps all 
comfortably corralled, and finally found ourselves out by the 
Seventeenth Corps headquarters. Two or three companies 
were sent out to picket several roads that seemed to cross at 
that point, as it was reported ' Rebel Cavalr}'- ' had been seen on 
these roads but a short time before, and this accounted for our 
being rushed out in such a great hurry. 

"We had just stacked arms and were going to talce a little 
rest after our rapid march, Avhen several Rebel prisoners wore 
brought in by some of the hoys who had straggled a little. 
They found the Rebels on the road we had just marched out on. 
Up to this time not a shot had been fired. All was quiet back 
at the main works we had just left, when suddenly we saw 
several staff officers come tearing up to the Colonel, who ordered 
us to ' fall in ! ' ' take arms ! ' ' about, face ! ' The Lieutenant 
Colonel dashed down one of the roads wiiere one of tiie com- 
panies had gone out on picket. The Major and Adjutant 
galloped dovv-n the others. We did not ^YSiit for them to come 
back, though, but moved right back on the road we had just 
come out, in line of battle, our colors in the road, and our flanks 
in open timber. We soon reached a fence enclosing a large 
field, and there could see a line of Rebels moving by the fiank, 
and forming, facing toward Atlanta, but to the left and in the 
rear of the position occupied by our Corjos, As soon as we 



g72 ANDEKSOXVILLE. 

reached the fence vtq fired a round or two into the backs of 
these gray coats, Avho broke into confusion. 

" Just then the other companies joined us, and we moved off 
on ' double quick by the right flank,' for you see we were com- 
pletely cut off from the troops up at tlie front, and we had to 
get well over to the right to get around the flank of the liebels. 
Just about the time we fired on the Eebels the Sixteenth Corps 
opened up a hot fire of musketry and artillery on them, some 
of their shot coming over mighty close to where we Avere. We 
marched pretty fast, and finally turned in through some open 
fields to the left, and came out just in the rear of the Sixteenth 
Corps, who were fighting like devils along their whole line. 

"Just as we came out into the open field we saw General R. 
K. Scott, who used to be our Colonel, and who commanded our 
brigade, come tearing toward us with one or two aids or order- 
lies. He was on his big clay-bank horse, ' Old Ilatchie,' as we 
caUed him, as we captured him on the battlefield at the battle 
of ' Matamora,' or ' Hell on the Ilatchie,' as our boys always 
called it. He rode up to the Colonel, said something hastily, 
when all at once we heard the all-firedest crash of musketry and 
artillery way up at the front where we had built the works the 
night before and left the rest of our brigade and Division get- 
ting ready to prance into Atlanta when we were sent off to the 
rear. Scott put spurs to his old horse, who was one of the fast- 
est runners in our Division, and away he went back towards the 
position where his brigade and the troops immediately to their 
left Avere now hotly engaged. He rode right along in rear of the 
Sixteenth Corps, paying no attention apparently to the shot and 
shell and bullets that were tearing up the earth and exploding 
and striking all around him. IILs aids and orderlies vainly 
tried to keep up with him. We could plainly see the Eebel 
lines as they came out of the woods into the open grounds to 
attack the Sixteenth Corps, which had hastily formed in the 
open field, -without any signs of works, and were standing up 
like men, having a hand-to-hand figlit. We were just far enough 
in the rear so that every blasted shot or shell that was fired too 
high to hit the ranks of the Sixteenth Corps came rattling 
over amongst us. All this time we were marching fast, follow- 
ing in the direction General Scott had taken, who evidently had 



A 8T0BY OF KEBEL MILITARY PRISONS. 



273 



ordered the Colonel to join his brigade up at the front. "We 
were down under the crest of a little hill, following along the 
bank of a little creek, keeping under cover of the bank as much 
as possible to protect us from the shots of the enemy. We 
suddenly saw General Logan and one or two of his staff upon 




LOGAN TAKING COMMAND OF THE ARMY OF THE TENNESSEE. 



the right bank of the ravine riding rapidly toward us. As he 

neared the head of the regiment he shouted : 

" ' Halt ! What regiment is that, and where are you going ? ' 
" The Colonel, in a loud voice, that all could hear, told him : 
" The Sixty-Eighth Ohio ; going to join our brigade of the 

Third Division — your old Division, General, of the Seventeenth 

Corps." 

" Logan says, ' you had better go right in here on the left of 

Dodge. The Third Division have hardly ground enough left 

now to bury their dead. God knows they need you. But try it 

on, if you think you can get to them.' 

" Just at this moment a staff officer came riding up on the 
18 



274 AJ^DKJibU^N ILLh,. 

opposite side of the ravine from wliere Logan was and inter- 
rupted Logan, who was about telling the Colonel not to try to 
go to the position held by the Third Division by the road cut 
through the woods whence we had come out, but to keep off to 
the right towards the Fifteenth Corps, as the woods referred to 
were full of Kebels. The officer saluted Logan, and shouted 
across: 

" ' General Sherman directs me to inform you of the death of 
General McPherson, and orders you to take command of the 
Army of the Tennessee; have Dodge close well up to the 
Seventeenth Corps, and Sherman will reinforce you to the 
extent of the whole army.' 

" Logan, standing in his stirrups, on his beautiful black horse, 
formed a picture against the blue sky as we looked up the 
ravine at him, his black eyes fairly blazing and his long black 
hair waving in the wind. He replied in a ringing, clear tone 
that we all could hear : 

" ' Say to General Sherman I have heard of McPherson's 
death, and have assumed the command of the Army of the 
Tennessee, and have already anticipated his orders in regard to 
closing the gap between Dodge and the Seventeenth Corps.' 

" This, of course, all happened in one quarter of the time I 
have been telling you. Logan put spurs to his horse and rode 
in one direction, the staff officer of General Sherman in another, 
and we started on a rapid step toward the front. This was the 
first we had heard of McPherson's death, and it made us feel 
very bad. Some of the officers and men cried as though they 
had lost a brother ; others pressed their lips, gritted their teeth, 
and swore to avenge his death. He was a great favorite with 
all his Army, particularly of our Corps, which he commanded 
for a long while. Our company, especially, knew him well, 
and loved him dearly, for we had been his Headquarters Guard 
for over a year. As we marched along, toward the front, we 
could see brigades, and regiments, and batteries of artillery, 
coming over from the right of the Army, and taking position 
in new lines in rear of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Corps. 
Major Generals and their staffs. Brigadier Generals and their 
staffs, were mighty thick along the banks of the little ravine 
we were following; stragglers and wounded men by the 



A STORY OF KEBEL MILITAKY PRISONS. 275 

hundred were pouring in to the safe shelter formed by the 
broken ground along which Ave were rapidly marching ; stories 
were heard of divisions, brigades and regiments that these 
wounded or stragglers belonged, having been all cut to pieces ; 
olBcers all killed ; and the speaker, the only one of his command 
not killed, wounded or captured. But you boys have heard and 
seen the same cowardly sneaks, probabl}^, in fights that you 
were in. The battle raged furiously all this time ; part of the 
time the Sixteenth Corps seemed to be in the worst ; then it 
would let up on them and the Seventeenth Corps would be 
hotly engaged along their whole front. 

" We hifd probably marched half an hour since leaving Logan, 
'and were getting pretty near back to our main line of works, 
when the Colonel ordered a halt and knapsacks to be unslung 
and piled up. I tell you it was a relief to get them off, for it 
was a fearful hot day, and we had been marching almost double 
quick. We knew that this meant business though, and that we 
were stripping for the fight, which we would soon be in. Just 
at this moment we saw an ambulance, with the horses on a dead 
run, followed by two or three mounted officers and men, coming 
right towards us out of the very woods Logan had cautioned 
the Colonel to avoid. When the ambulance got to where we 
were it halted. It was pretty well out of danger from the 
bullets and shell of the enemy. They stopped, and we recog- 
nized Major Strong, of McPherson's Staff, whom we all knew, 
as he was the Chief Inspector of our Corps, and in the ambu- 
lance he had the body of General McPherson. Major Strong, 
it appears, during a slight lull in the fighting at that part of 
the line, having taken an ambulance and driven into the very 
jaws of death to recover the remains of his loved commander. 
It seems he found the body right by the side of the little road 
that we had gone out on when we went to the rear. He was 
dead when he found him, having been shot off his horse, the 
bullet striking him in the back, just below his heart, probably 
killing him instantly. There was a young fellow "svith him who 
was wounded also, Avhen Strong found them. He belonged to 
our First Division, and recognized General McPherson, and 
stood by him until Major Strong came up. He was in the 
ambulance with the body of McPherson when they stopped by us. 



276 



ANDEKSONVILLE. 



" It seems that when the fight opened away back in the rear 
where we had been, and at the left of the Sixteenth CorpS) 
wJiich was almost directly in the rear of the Seventeenth Corps, 
McPherson sent his staff and orderlies with various orders to 




PEATn OF T.l'l'nERSON. 

different parts of the Ime, and started himself to ride over 
from the Seventeenth Corps to the Sixteenth Corps, taking 
exactly the same course our Regiment had, perhaps an hour 
before, but the Hebels had discovered there was a ga}) between 
the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Corps, and meeting no opposi- 
tion to their advances in this strip of woods, where they were 
hidden from view, they had marched right along down in the 
rear, and with their line at right angles with the line of works 
occupied by the left of the Seventeenth Corps ; they were thus 
parallel and close to the little road McPherson had taken, and 
probably he rode right into them and ^vas killed before he real- 
ized the true situation.* 



A STOJRY OF KEBEL MILITARY PRISONS. 277 

" Having piled our knapsacks, and left a couple of our older 
men, who \rere played out with the heat and most ready to 
drop with sunstroke, to guard them, we started on again. The 
ambulance with the corpse of Gen. McPherson moved off 
towards the right of the Army, which was the last we ever saw 
of that brave and handsome soldier. 

" We bore off a little to the right of a large open field on top 
of a high hill where one of our batteries was pounding away at 
a tremendous rate. We came up to the main line of works just 
about at the left of the Fifteenth Corps. They seemed to be 
having an easy time of it just then — no fighting going on in 
their front, except occasional shots from some heavy guns on 
the main line of Kebel works around the City. We crossed 
right over the Fifteenth Corps' works and filed to the left, 
keeping along on the outside of our works. We had not gone 
far before the Eebel gunners in the main works around the 
City discovered us ; and the way they did tear loose at us Avas a 
caution. Their aim was rather bad, however, and most of their 
shots went over us. We saw one of them — I think it was a 
shell — strike an artillery caisson belonging to one of our bat- 
teries. It exploded as it struck, and then the caisson, which 
was full of ammunition, exploded wath an awful noise, throw- 
ing pieces of wood and iron and its own load of shot and shell 
high into the air, scattering death and destruction to the men 
and horses attached to it. We thought we saw arms and leirs 
and parts of bodies of men flying in every direction ; but we 
were glad to learn afterwards that it was the contents of the 
knapsacks of the Battery boys, who had strapped them on the 
caissons for transportation. 

"Just after passing the hill where our battery was makinn^ 
things so liveh", they stopped firing to let us pass. AVe sa^v 
General Leggett, our Division Commander, come riding toward 
us. He was outside of our line of works, too. You know how we 
build breastworks — sort of zigzag like, you know, so they can- 
not be enfiladed. Well, that's just the way the works were 
along there, and you never saw such a curious sliape as we 
formed our Division in. Why, part of them were on one side 
of the works, and go along a little further and here was a reg- 



S78 



ANDKESONVILLE. 



iment, or part of a regiment on the other side, both sets firing 
in opposite directions. 

" No sir'ee, they were not demoralized or in confusion, they 
were cool and as steady as on parade. But the old Division 
had, you know, never been driven from any jiosition tiiey had 
once taken, in all their long service, and they did nut propose 







THE WORK OF A SHELL. 

to leave that ridge until they got orders from some one beside 
the llebs. 

" There were times when a fellow did not know which side 
of the works was the safest, for the Johnnies were in front of 
us and in rear of us. You see, our Fourth Division, which had 
been to the left of us, had been forced to quit their works, when 
the Rebs got into the works in their rear, so that our Division 
was now at the point where our line turned sharply to the left, 
and rear — in the direction of the Sixteenth Corps. 

" We got into business before we had been there over three 
minutes. A line of the Rebs tried to charge across the open 
fields in front of us, but by the help of the old twenty-four- 
pounders (which proved to be part of Cooper's Illinois Battery, 
that we had been alongside of in many a hard fight before), 
we drove them back a-flying, only to have to jump over on the 
outside of our works the next minute to tackle a heavy force 



A STORY OF REBEL MILITARY PRISONS. 279 

that came for our rear through that blasted strip of woods. 
"We soon drove them off, and the firing on both sides seemed to 
have pretty much stopped. 

" ' Our Brigade,' which vre discovered, was now commanded 
by < Old Whiskers' (Colonel Wiles, of the Seventy-Eighth Ohio. 
I'll bet he's got the longest whiskers of any man in the Army.) 
You see General Scott had not been seen or heard of since he 
had started to the rear after our regiment when tlie tiglning 
first commenced. We all believed that he was either killed or 
captured, or he would have been with his command. He was a 
splendid soldier, and a bull-dog of a fighter. His absence was 
a great loss, but we had not much time to think of such things, 
for our brigade was then ordered to leave the works and to 
move to the right about twenty or thirty rods across a large 
ravine, where we were placed in position in an open corn-field, 
forming a new line at quite an angle from the line of works we 
had just left, extending to the left, and getting us back nearer 
on to a line with the Sixteenth Corps. The battery of iiowit- 
zers, now reinforced by a part of the Third Ohio lieavy guns, 
still occupied the old works on the highest part of the liill, just 
to the right of our new line. We took our position just on the 
brow of a hill, and were ordered to lie down, and the rear rank 
to go for rails, which we discovered a few rods behind us in the 
shape of a good ten-rail fence. Eveiy rear-rank chap came 
back with all the rails he could lug, and we barely had time to 
lay them down in front of us, forming a little baricade of six 
toeiffht or ten inches hiirh, when we heard the most unearthly 
Kebel yell directly in front of us. It grew louder and came 
nearer and nearer, until we could see a solid line of the gray 
coats commg out of the woods and down the opposite slope, 
their battle flags flying, officers in front with dra^vn swords, 
arms at right shoulder, and every one of them yelling like so 
many Sioux Indians. The line seemed to be massed six or 
eight ranks deep, followed closely by the second line, and that 
by the third, each, if possible, yelling louder and appearing 
more desperately reckless than the one ahead. At their first 
appearance we opened on them, and so did the bully old twenty- 
four-pounders, with canister. 

" On they came ; the first line staggered and wavered back on 



280 ANDEESONVILLE. 

to the second, which was coining on the double quick. Such a 
raMng as we did give them. Oh, Lordy, how we did wish that 
we had the breech loading Spencers or Winchesters. But we 
had the old reliable SiDringfields, and we poured it in hot and 
heavy. By the time the charging column got down the oppo- 
site slope, and were struggling through the thicket of under- 
growth in the ravine, they were one confused mass of officers 
and men, the three hues now forming one solid column, which 
made several desperate efforts to rush up to the top of the hill 
where we were punishing them so. One of their first surges 
came mighty near going right over the left of our Regiment, 
as they were lying down behind their little rail piles. But the 
boys clubbed their guns and the officers used their revolvers 
and swords and drove them back down the hill. 

" The Seventy-Eighth and Twentieth Ohio, our right and left 
bowers, who had been brigaded with us ever since ' Shiloh,' 
were into it as hot and heavy as we had been, and had lost 
numbers of their officers and men, but were lianging on to their 
little rail piles when the fight was over. At one time the Rebs 
were right in on top of the Seventy-Eighth. One big Reb 
grabbed their colors, and tried to pull them out of the hands of 
the color-bearer. But old Captain Orr, a little, short, dried-up 
fellow, about sixty years old, struck him with his sword across 
the back of the neck, and killed him deader than a mackerel, 
right in his tracks. 

" It was now getting dark, and the Johnnies concluded they 
had taken a bigger contract in trying to drive us off that hill 
in one day than they had counted on, so they quit charging on 
us, but drew back under cover of the woods and along the old 
line of works that we had left, and kept up a pecking away and 
sharpshooting at us all night long. They opened fire on us 
from a number of pieces of artillery from the front, from the 
left, and from some heavy guns away over to the right of us, 
in the main works around Atlanta. 

" We did not fool away much time that night, either. "We 
got our shovels and picks, and while part of us were sharp- 
shooting and trying to keep the Rebels from working up too 
close to us, the rest of the boys were putting up some good 
solid earthworks right where our rail piles had been, and by 



A 8T0KT OF EEBEL MILITARY PRISONS. 



281 



morning we were in splendid shape to have received our friends, 
no matter which way they had come at us, for they kept up 
such an all-fired shellmg of us from so many diif erent directions, 
that the bo^^s had built traverses and bomb-proofs at all sorts 
of angles and in all directions. 

" There was one point off to our right, a few rods up along 




THE FIGHT FOR THE FLAG. 



our old line of worlcs where there was a crowd of Eebel shar]> 
shooters that annoyed us more than all the rest, by their con- 
stant firing at us through the night. They killed one of Com- 
pany II's boys, and wounded several others. Finally Captain 
"Williams, of D Company, came along and said he wanted a 
couple of good shots out of our company to go with him, so 1 
went for one. lie took about ten of us, and we crawled down 
into the ravine in front of where we were building the works, 
and got behind a large fallen tree, and we laid there and could 
just fire right up into the rear of those fellows as they lay in 



282 AITDEKSONYILLE. 

behind a traverse extending back from our old line of works. 
It was so dark we could only see where to fire by the flash of 
gxms, but every time they would shoot, some of us would let 
them have one. They staid there until almost daylight, when 
they concluded as things looked, since we were going to stay, 
they had better be going. 

" It was an awful night. Do^vn in the ravine below us lay 
hundreds of killed and wounded Eebels, groaning and crying 
aloud for water and for help. We did do what we could for 
those right around us — but it was so dark, and so many sheU 
bursting and buUets flying around that a fellow could not get 
about much. I tell you it was pretty tough next morning to 
go along to the different companies of our regiment and hear 
who were among the killed and wounded, and to see the long 
row of graves that were being dug to bury our comrades and 
our officers. There was the Captain of Company E, Nelson 
Skeeles, of Fulton County, O., one of the bravest and best 
officers in the regiment. By his side lay First Sergeant Lesnit, 
and next were the two great, powerful Shepherds — cousins — 
but more like brothers. One, it seems, was killed whQe sup- 
porting the head of the other, who had just received a death 
wound, thus dying in each other's arms. 

" But I can't begin to think or tell you the names of all the 
poor boys that we laid away to rest in their last, long sleep on 
that gloomy day. Our Major was severely wounded, and 
several other officers had been hit more or less badly. 

" It was a frightful sight, though, to go over the field in front 
of our works on that morning. The Rebel dead and badly 
wounded laid where they had fallen. The bottom and opposite 
side of the ravine showed how destructive our fire and that ol 
the canister from the howitzers had been. The underbrush was 
cut, slashed, and torn into shreds, and the larger trees were 
scarred, bruised and broken by the thousands of bullets and 
other missiles that had been poured into theui from almost 
every conceivable direction during the day before. 

" A lot of us bo3"s went way over to the left into Fuller's 
Division of the Sixteenth Corps, to see how some of our boys 
over there had got tlirough the scrimmage, for they Jiad about 
as nasty a fight as any part of tlie Army, and if it hatl not been 



A BTOET OF REBEL MILITARY PRISONS. 



283 



for their being just where they were, I am not sure but what 
the old Seventeenth Corps would have had a different story to 
tell now. We found our friends had been way out by Decatur, 
where their brigade had got into a pretty lively fight on their 
own hook. 

""We got back to camp, and the first thing I knew I wa-, 




m THE RIFLE-PIT AFTER THE P.ATTLE. 

detailed for picket duty, and we Avere })osted over a few rods 
across the ravine in our front. We had not been out but a 
short time when we saw a flag of truce, borne by an officer, 
coming towards us. We halted him, and made him wait until 
a report was sent back to Corps headquarters. The Eebel 
officer was quite chatty and talkative with our picket officer, 
while waiting. He said he was on General Cleburne's staff, 
and that the troops that charged us so fiercely the evening 
before was Cleburne's whole Division, and that after their last 
repulse, knowing the hill where we were posted was the most 
important position along our line, he felt that if they would 
keep close to us durmg the night, and keep up a show of fight, 
that we would pull out and abandon the hill before morning. 
He said that he, with about fifty of their best men, had volun- 



5384 ANDEESONVILLE. 

teered to keep up the demonstration, and it was his party that 
had occupied the traverse in our old works the night before 
and had annoyed us and the Battery men by their constant 
sharpshooting, which we fellows behind the old tree had 
finally tired out. He said they staid until almost daylight, and 
that he lost more than half his men before he left. He also 
told us that General Scott was captured by their Division, at 
about the time and almost the same spot as where General 
McPherson was killed, and that he was not hurt or wounded, 
and was now a prisoner in their hands,. 

" Quite a lot of our staff officers soon came out, and as near 
as we could learn the Kebels Avanted a truce to bury their dead. 
Our folks tried to get up an exchange of prisoners that had 
been taken by both sides the day before, but for some reason 
they could not bring it about. But the truce for burying the 
dead was agreed to. Along about dusk some of the boys on 
my post got to telling about a lot of silver and brass instru- 
ments that belonged to one of the bands of the Fourth Division, 
which had been hung up in some small trees a little way over in 
front of where we were when the light was going on the day 
before, and that when a bullet would strike one of the horns 
they could hear it go 'pin-g' and in a few minutes 'pan-g' 
would go another bullet through one of them. 

" A new picket was just coming on, and I had picked up my 
blanket and haversack, and was about ready to start back to 
camp, when, thinks I, ' I'll just go out there and see about them 
horns.' I told the boys what I was going to do. They all 
seemed to think it was safe enough, so out I started. I had not 
gone more than a hundred yards, I should think, when here I 
found the horns all hanging around on the trees just as the 
boys had described. Some of them had lots of bullet holes in 
them. But I saw a beautiful, nice lookina- silver bunle hano;insr 
off to one side a little. ' Thinks,' says I, ' I'll just take that 
Uttle toot horn in out of the "\vet, and take it back to camp.' I 
was just reaching up after it when I heard some one say, 
* Halt! ' and I'U be dog-goned if there wasn't two of the 
meanest looking Bebels, standing not ten feet from me, with 
their guns cocked and ])ointed at me, and, of course, I knew I 
was a goner. They walked me back about one hundred and 



▲ STORY OF REBEL MILITARY PRISONS. 



285 



fifty yards, where their picket line Avas. From there I was 
kept going for an hour or two until we got over to a place on 
the railroad called East Point. There I got in with a big 
crowd of our prisoners, who were taken th^ day before, and we 




TAKEN ix. 



have been fooling along in a lot of old cattle cars getting 
down here ever since. 

« So this is ' Andersonville,' is it ? Well, by 1 " 



CHAPTER XLI. 

olothing: its rapit) deterioration, and devices to eeplknish 
IT — desperate efforts to cover nakedness — "littlb eed- 
OAp" and uis letter. 

Clothing had now become an object of real solicitude to us 
older prisoners. The veterans of our crowd — the surviving 
remnant of those captured at Gettysburg — had been pris- 
oners over a year. The next in seniority — the Chickamauga 
"boys — had been in ten months. The Mine Run fellows were 
eight months old, and my battalion had had seven months' in- 
carceration. None of us were models of well-dressed gentle- 
men when captured. Our garments told the whole story of 
the hard campaigning we had undergone. Now, with months 
of the wear and tear of prison life, sleeping on the sand, 
working in tunnels, digging wells, etc., we were tattered and 
torn to an extent that a second-class tramp would have con- 
sidered disgraceful. 

This is no reflection upon the quality of the clothes furnished 
by the Government. We simply reached the limit of the wear 
of textile fabrics. I am particular to say this, because I want 
to contribute my little mite towards doing justice to a badly 
abused part of our Army organization — the Quartermaster's 
Department. It is fashionable to speak of " shoddy," and utter 
some stereotyped sneers about " brown paper shoes," and " mus- 
keto-netting overcoats," when any discussion of the Quarter, 
master service is the subject of conversation, but I have no 
hesitation in asking the indorsement of my comrades to the 
statement that we have never found anywhere else as durable 
garments as those furnished us by the Government during our 



A STOKY OF KEBEL MILITAKY I'KISONS. 



28'J 



service in the Army. The clothes were not as fine in texture, 
nor so stylish in cut as those we Avore before or since, but when 
it came to wear tJaey could be relied on to the last thread. It 
was always marvelous to me that they lasted so well, with the 
rough usage a soldier in the field must necessarily give them. 

But to return to my subject. I can best illustrate the way 
our clothes dropped off us, piece by piece, like tlie petals from 
the last rose of Summer, by taking my own case as an example: 
When I entered prison I was clad in the ordinary garb of an 
enlisted man of the cavalry — stout, comfortable boots, woolen 
xxjks, drawers, pantaloons, with a " re-enforcement," or " ready- 
made patches," as the infantry called them ;, 
vest, warm, snug-fitting jacket, under and 
over shirts, heavy overcoat, and a forage-cap. 
First my boots fell into cureless ruin, but this 
was no special hardship, as the weather had 
become quite warm, and it was more pleasant 
than otherwise to go barefooted. Then part 
of the underclothing retired from service. 
The jacket and vest followed, their end being 
hastened by having their best portions taken 
to patch up the pantaloons, which kept giving 
y out at the most embarrassing places. Then 
5 the cape of the overcoat was called upon to 
' assist in repairing these continually-recurring 
breaches in the nether garments. The same 
insatiate demand finally consumed the whole 
coat, in a vain attempt to prevent an exposure 
of person greater than consistent with the usages of society. 
The pantaloons — or what, by courtesy, I called such, were a 
monument of careful and ingenious, but hopeless, patching, that 
should have called forth the admiration of a Florentine artist 
in mosaic. I have been shown — in later years — many table- 
tops, ornamented in marquetry, inlaid with thousands of little 
bits of wood, cunningly arranged, and patiently joined together. 
I always look at them with interest, for I know the work spen»5 
upon them : I remember my Andersonville pantaloons. 

The clothing upon the upper part of my body had heem 
reduced to the remains of a knit undershirt. It had fallen into 




TH« author's APPBAR- 
ANCB ON ENTEKINO 
PRISON. 



288 



AKDEK.SUAVILLE. 




HI8 APPKARANCB IN JTTLT, 1864. 



SO many holes that it looked like the coarse " riddles " through 
which ashes and gravel are sifted. "Wherever these holes were 
the sun had burned my back, breast and shoulders deeply black. 
The parts covered by the threads and fragments forming thQ 

boundaries of the holes, were still 
white. When I pulled my alleged 
shirt off, to wash or to free it from 
some of its teeming population, my 
skin showed a fine lace pattern in 
black and white, that was very in- 
teresting to my comrades, and the 
subject of countless jokes by them. 

They used to descant loudly on the 
chaste elegance of the design, the 
richness of the tracing, etc., and beg 
me to furnish them with a copy of it 
when I got home, for their sisters to 
work window curtains or tidies by. 
They were sure that so striking a 
novelty in patterns would be very acceptable. I would reply 
to their witticisms in the language of Portia's Prince of 
Morocco : 

Slislike me not for my complexion— 
The shadowed livery of the burning sun. 

One of the stories told me in my childhood by an old negro 
nurse, was of a poverty stricken little girl " who slept on the 
floor and was covered with the door," a'hd she once asked — 

"Mamma, how do jpoor folks get along who haven't any 
door?" 

In the same spirit I used to wonder how jyoor fellows got 
along who hadn't any shirt. 

One common way of keeping up one's clothing was by stealing 
mealsacks. The meal furnished as rations was broufi-ht in in 
white cotton sacks. Sergeants of detachments were required 
to return these when the rations Avere issued the next day. I 
have before alluded to the general incapacity of the Eebels to 
deal accurately with even simple numbers. It was never very 
difficult for a shrewd Sergeant to make nine sacks count as ten. 
After awhile the Rebels began to see throught this sleight of 



A. STORY OF REBEL MILITARY PRISONS, 289 

hand manipulation, and to check it. Then the Sergeants 
resorted to the device of tearing the sacks in two, and turning 
each half in as a whole one. The cotton cloth gained in this 
way was used for patching, or, if a boy could succeed in beating 
the Rebels out of enough of it, he would fabricate himself a 
shirt or a pair of pantaloons. We obtained all our thread in 
the same way. A half of a sack, carefully raveled out, would 
furnish a cou})le of handfuls of thread. Had it not been for 
this resource all our sewing and mending would have come to 
a standstill. 

Most of our needles were manufactured by ourselves from 
bones. A piece of bone, split as near as jiossible to the required 
size, was carefully rubbed down u])on a brick, and then had an 
eye laboriously worked througli it with a l)it of wire or some- 
thing else available for the purpose. The needles were about 
the size of ordinary darning needles, and answered tlie purpose 
very well. 

These devices gave one some coucciition of the way savages 
provide for the wants of their lives. Time was with them, 
as jwith us, of little importance. It was no loss of time to 
them, nor to us, to spend a large i)ortion of the waking hours 
of a week in fabricating a needle out of a bone, where a civi- 
lized man could purchase a much better one with tJie ]:)roduct 
of three minutes' labor. I do not think any red Indian of the 
plains exceeded us in the patience with which Ave worked away 
at these minutias of life's needs. 

Of course the most common source of clothing was the dead, 
and no body was carried out with any clothing on it that could 
be of service to the survivors. The Plymouth Pilgriijis, who 
were so well clothed on coming in, and were now dying off 
very rapidly, furnished many good suits to cover the nakedness 
of older prisoners. Most of the prisoners from the xVrmy of 
the Potomac were well dressed, and as very many died v^^iihin 
a month or six weeks after their entrance, they left their clothes 
in pretty good condition for those who constituted themselves 
their heirs, administrators and assigns. 

For my own part, I had the greatest aversion to wearing 
dead men's clothes, and could only bring myself to it after I 
19 



290 AJ^DEESONVILLE. 

had been a year in prison, and it became a question between 
doing that and freezing to death. 

Every new batch of prisoners was besieged with anxious 
inquiries on the subject which lay closest to all our hearts : 

" ^V7lat are they doing about exchange f " 

N'othing in human experience — save the anxious expectancy 
of a sail by castaways on a desert island — could cnial the 
intense eagerness with which this question was asked, and the 
answer awaited. To thousands now hanging on the verge of 
eternity it meant life or death. Between the first day of July 
and the first of November over twelve thousand men died, who 
would doubtless have lived had they been able to reach our 
fines — "get to God's country," as we expressed it. 

The new comers brought little reliable news of contem plated 
exchange. There was none to bring in the first place, and in 
the next, soldiers in active service in the field had other things 
to busy themselves with than reading up the details of the 
negotiations between the Commissioners of Exchange. They 
had all heard rumors, however, and by the time they reached 
Andersonville, they had crystallized these into actual statements 
of fact. A half hour after they entered the Stockade, a report 
like this would spread like wildfire : 

" An Army of the Potomac man has just come in, who was 
captured in front of Petersburg. lie says that he read in the 
Kew York Herald, the day before he was taken, that an 
exchange had been agreed upon, and that our ships had ah-eady 
started for Savannah to take us home." 

Then our hopes would soar up lili:e balloons. "We fed our- 
selves on such stuff from day to day, and doubtless many lives 
were greatly prolonged by the continual encouragement. There 
was hardly a day when I did not say to myself that I would 
much rather die than endm'e imprisonment another month, and 
had I believed that another month would see me still there, I 
am pretty certain that I should have ended the matter by 
crossing the Dead Line. I was firmly resolved not to die the 
disgusting, agonizing death that so many around me were dying. 

One of our best purveyors of information was a bright, blue- 
eyed, fair-haired httle drummer boy, as handsome as a girl, 



A 8TOJBT OF REBEL MILITARY PRISONS. 



2^1 



well-bred as a lady, and evidently the darling of some refined, 
loving mother. He belonged, I think, to some loyal Yirginia 
regiment, Avas captured in one of the actions in the Shenandoah 
Yalley, and had been with us in Kichmond. We called him 
" Eed Cap," from his wearing a jaunty, gold-laced, crimson 
cap. Ordinarily, the smaller a drummer boy is the harder he 

is, but no amount of attrition 
with rough men could coarsen 
the ingrained refinement of Red 
Cap's manners. He was betweei^ 
thirteen and fourteen, and it 
seemed utterly shameful that 
men, calling themselves soldiers, 
should make war on such a tender 
boy and drag him off to prison. 
But no six-footer had a more 
soldierly heart than little Red 
Cap, and none were more loyal 
to the cause. It was a pleasure 
to hear him tell the story of the 
fights and movements his regi- 
ment had been engaged in. He 
was a good observer and told 
his tale with boyish fervor. 
Shortly after Wirz assumed command he took Red Cap into 
his office as an Orderly. His bright face and winning manners 
fascinated the women visitors at headquarters, and numbers of 
them tried to adopt him, but with poor success. Like the rest 
of us, he could see few charms in an existence under the Rebel 
flag, and tyrned a deaf ear* to their blandishments. lie" kept 
his ears open to the conversation of the Rebel officers around 
him, and frequently secured permission to visit the interior of 
the Stockade, Avhen he would communicate to us all that he had 
heard. lie received a flattering reception every time he came 
in, and no orator ever secured a more attentive audience than 
would gather around him to listen to what he had to say. He 
was, beyond a doubt, the best known and most popular person 
in the prison, and I know all the survivors of his old admirers 
share my great interest in him, and my curiosity as to whether 




LITTLE RED CAP. 



292 ANDERSOXVILLK. 

he yet lives, and whether his subsequent career has justified the 
sanguine hopes we all had as to his future. I hope that if he 
sees this, or any one who knows anything about him, he will 
communicate with me. There are thousands who will be glad 
to hear from him. 

[A most remarkable coincidence occurred in regard to this 
comrade. Several days after the above had been \\Titten, and 
" set up," but before it iiad j'^et appeared in the paper, I received 
the following letter : 

ECKHART MLtfES, 

Allegliany County, Md., March 24. 
To the Editor of the Bladb : 

Last evening I saw a copy of your paper, in which was a chapter or two of 
a prison life of a soldier during the late war. I was forcibly struck with the 
correctness of what he wrote, and the names of several of my old comrades 
which he quoted: Hill, Limber Jim, etc, etc. I was a drummer boy of Com- 
pany I, Tenth West Virginia Infantry, and was fifteen years of age a day or 
two after arriving in Andersonville, which was in the last of February, 1864 
Nineteen of my comrades were there with me, and, poor fellows, they are there 
yet. I have no doubt that I would have remained there, too, had I not been 
more fortunate. 

I do not know who your soldier correspondent is, but assume-.to say that 
from the following description he will remember having seen me in Ander- 
sonville: I was the little boy that for three or four months officiated at 
orderly for Captain Wirz. I wore a red cap, and every day could be seen 
riding Wirz's gray mare, either at headquarters, or about the Stockade. I 
was acting in this capacity when the six raiders — "Mosby," (proper name 
Collins) Delaney, Curtis, and — I forget the other names — were executed. 
I believe that I was the first that conveyed the intelligence to them that Con- 
federate General Winder had approved their sentence. As soon as Wirz 
received the dispatch to that effect, I ran down to the stocks and told them. 

I visited Hill, of Wauseon, Fulton County, O., since the war, and found 
him hale and hearty. I have not heard from him for a number of years until 
reading your correspondent's letter last evening. It is the only letter of the 
series that I have seen, but after rending that one, I feel called upon to certify 
that I have no doubts of the truthfulness of your correspondent's story. 
The world will never know or believe the horrors of Andersonville and 
other prisons in the South Xo living, human being, in my judgment, will 
ever be able to properly paint the horrors of those infernal dens. 

I formed the acquaintance of several Ohio soldiers whilst in prison. 
Among these were O. D. Streeter, of Cleveland, who went to Andersonville 
about the same time that I did, and escaped, and was the only man that I 
ever knew that escaped and reached our lines. After an absence of several 
months he was retaken in one of ijherman's battles before Atlanta, and 
brought back. I also knew John L. Richards, of Fostoria, Seneca County, 
O., or Eagles ville. Wood County. Also, a man by the name of Beverly, who 



A STOKT OF REBEL MILITAKY PRISONS. 



293 



was a partner of Charley Huckleby, of Tennessee. I would like to hearfron 
all of these parties. They all know me. 

Mr. Editor, I will close by wishing all my comrades who shared in the Buf> 
ferings and dangers of Coufederate prisons, a long and useful life. 

Yours iru!}', 

1L\>SU.U T. POWBLI^ 




FRESH FISH. 



CHAPTEE XLH. 

SOME FEATHEES OF THE MORTALITY PERCENTAGE OF DEATHS TO 

THOSE LIYINO AN AVERAGE MAN ONLY 8TAJn)8 THE MI8EET 

THREE MONTHS DESCRIPTION OF THE PRISON AND THE CONDI- 
TION OF THE MEN THEREIN, BY A LEADING SCIENTIFIO MAN OF 
THE SOUTH. 

Speaking of the manner in which the Plymouth Pilgrims 
were now dying, I am reminded of my theory that the ordinary 
man's endurance of this prison life did not average over three 
months. The Plymouth boys arrived in May ; the bulk of 
those who died passed away in July and August. The great 
increase of prisoners from all sources was in May, June and 
July. The greatest mortality among these was in August, 
September and October. The following table, which shows the 
number of new prisoners arriving each month, and the number 
dying the third month after, will illustrate on what I base my 
theory : 



NUMBER ARRIVED IN 

May 8,735 

June 9,114 

July 7,228 



NUMBER DIED IN 

Aut::u8t 8,076 

September 2,794 

October 1,590 



Many came in who had been in good health during tlieir' ser- 
vice in the field, but who seemed utterly overwhelmed by the 
appalling misery they saw on every hand, and gi^'ing way to 
desjiondency, died in a few days or weeks. I do not mean to 
include tliem in the above class, as their sickness was more 
mental than physical. My idea is that, taking one hundred 
ordinaril}'' liealthful young soldiers from a regiment in active 
Befvice, and putting them into Andersonville, by the end of the 
third month at least thirty-three of those weakest and most 



A STORY OF KEBEL MILITARY PRISONS. 297 

vulnerable to disease would have succumbed to the exposure, the 
pollution of ground and air, and the insufficiency of the ration 
of coarse corn Ineal. After this the mortality would be some- 
what less, say at the end of six months fifty of them would be 
dead. The remainder would hang on still more tenaciously, 
and at the end of a year there would be fifteen or twenty still 
alive. There were sixty-three of my company taken ; thirteen 
lived through. I believe this was about the usual proportion 
for those who were in as long as we. In all there were forty- w 
five thousand six hundred and thirteen prisoners brought into 
Anderson vllle. Of these twelve thousand nine hundred and 
twelve died there, to say nothing of thousands that died in 
other prisons in Georgia and the Carolinas, immediately after 
their removal from Andersonville. One of every three and j 
a-half men upon whom the gates of the Stockade closed never / 
repassed them alive. Twenty-nine per cent, of the boys who / 
so much as set foot in Andersonville died there. Let it be kept / 
in mind all the time, that the average stay of a prisoner theror 
was not four months. The great majority came in after the 
1st of May, and left before the middle of September. May 1, 
1864, there were ten thousand four hundred and twenty-seven 
in the Stockade. August 8 there were thirty-three thousand 
one hundred and fourteen ; September 30 all these were dead or 
gone, except eight thousand two hundred and eighteen, of 
whom four thousand five hundred and ninety died inside of the 
next thirty days. The records of the world can show no 
parallel to this astounding mortahty. 

Since the above matter was first published in the Blade, a 
friend has sent me a transcript of the evidence at the Wirz 
trial, of Professor Joseph Jones, a Surgeon of high rank in the 
Kebel Army, and who stood at the head of the medical pro- 
fession in Georgia. lie visited Andersonville at the instance of 
the Surgeon-General of the Confederate States' Army, to make 
a study, for the benefit of science, of the phenomena of disease 
occurring there. His capacity and opportunities for observa- 
tion, and for clearly estimating the value of the facts coming 
under his notice were, of course, vastly superior to mine, and 
as he states the case stronger than I dare to, for fear of being 
accused of exaggeration and downright untruth, I reproduce 



298 AJnDERSONYlLLE. 

the major part of his testimony — embodying also his official 
report to medical headquarters at Hichmond — that my readers 
may know how the prison appeared to the eyes of one who, 
thouG^h a bitter Rebel, was still a humane man and a conscien- 
tious observer, striving to learn the truth : 



MEDICAL TESTIMONY. 

[Trangcrlpt from the printed testimony at the Wirz Trial, pages 618 to 639, IncluslTe.] 

OCTOBEB 7, 1865. 

Dr. Joseph Jones, for the prosecution : 

By the Judge Advocate : 

Question. Where do you reside ? 

Answer, In Augusta, Georgia. 

Q. Are you a graduate of any medical coUege ? 

A. Of the University of Pennsylvania. 

Q. How long have you been engaged in the practice of medi- 
cine? 

A. Eight years. 

Q. Has your experience been as a practitioner, or rather aa 
an investigator of medicine as a science ? 

A. Both. 

Q. What position do you hold now ? 

A. That of Medical Chemist in the Medical College of Geor 
gia, at Augusta. 

Q. How long have you held your position in that coUege? 

A. Since 1858. 

Q. How were you employed during the Rebelhon ? 

A. I served six months in the early part of it as a private in 
the ranks, and the rest of the time in the medical department. 

Q. Under the direction of whom ? 

A. Under the direction of Dr. Moore, Surgeon General. 

Q. Did you, while acting under his direction, visit Anderson- 
ville, professionally ? 

A. Yes, sir. 

Q. For the purpose of making investigations there ? 

A. For the purpose of prosecuting investigations ordered by 
the Surgeon General. 



A 8T0EY OF KEBEL MILITAET PRISONS. 299 

Q You went there in obedience to a letter of instructions ? 

A. In obedience to orders wliich I received. 

Q. Did you reduce tlie results of your investigations to the 
shape of a report ? 

A. I was engaged at that work when General Johnston sur- 
rendered his army. 

(A document being handed to witness.'^ 

Q. Have you examined this extract from your report and 
compared it with the original ? 

A. Yes, sir ; I have. 

Q. Is it accurate ? 

A. So far as my examination extended, it is accurate. ^ 

The document just examined by witness was offered in evi- 
dence, and is as follows : 

Observations upon the diseases of the Federal prisoners, eonflned in Camp Sumter, 
Andersonville, in Sumter County, Georgia, instituted with a view to illustrate 
chiefly the origin and causes of hospital gangrene, the relations of continued 
and malarial fevers, and the pathology of camp diarrhea and dysentery, by 
Joseph Jones, Surgeon P. A. G. S. , Professor of Medical Chemistry in the Medi- 
cal College of Georgia, at Augusta, Georgia. 

Hearing of the unusual mortality among the Federal pris- 
oners confined at Andersonville, Georgia, in the month of 
August, 186 J:, during a visit to Richmond, Ya., I expressed to 
the Surgeon General, S. P. Moore, Confederate States of 
America, a desire to visit Camp Sumter, with the design of 
instituting a series of inquiries upon the nature and causes of 
the prevailing diseases. Smallpox had appeared among the 
prisoners, and I believed that this would prove an admirable 
field for the establishment of its characteristic lesions. The 
condition of Peyer's glands in this disease was considered as 
worthy of minute investigation. It was believed that a large 
body of men from the Northern portion of the United States, 
suddenly transported to a warm Southern climate, and confined 
upon a small portion of land, would furnish an excellent field 
for the investigation of the relations of typhus, typhoid, and 
malarial fevers. 

The Surgeon General of the Confederate States of America 
furnished me with the following letter of introduction to the 



300 a:n"dersonville. 

Surgeon in chai'ge of the Confederate States Military Prison at 
Anderson ville, Ga.: 

Confederate States of America, ) 

Surgeon General's Office, Ricumond, Va. , >• 

August 6, 18(34. ) 

Sir:— The field of patholoijical iavestigations afforded by the large collec- 
tion of Federal prisoners in Georgia, is of great extent and importance, and 
it is believed that results of value to ihe profession may be obtained by & 
careful investigation of the effects of disease upon the large body of men sub- 
jected to a decided change of climate and tlie circumstances peculiar to prison 
life. The Surgeon in charge of the hospital for Federal prisoners, together 
with his assistants, will afford every facility to Surgeon Joseph Jo.aes, in the 
prosecution of the labors ordered by the Surgeon General. Efficient assist- 
ance must be rendered Surgeon Jones by the medical officers, not only in his 
examinations into the causes and symptoms of the various diseases, but 
especially in the arduous labors of post mortem examinations. 

The medical officers will assist in the performance of such post mortems as 
Surgeon Jones may indicate, in order that this great field for pathological 
investigation may be explored for the benefit of the Medical Department of 
the Confederate Army. 

S. P. MOORE, Surgeon Qeneral. 

Surgeon Isaiah H. White, 

In charge of Hospital for Federal prisoners, Andersonville, Oa. 

In compliance with this letter of the Surgeon General, Isaiah 
H. White, Chief Surgeon of the post, and R. E,. Stevenson, 
Surgeon in charge of the Prison Hospital, afforded the neces- 
sary facilities for the prosecution of my investigations among 
the sick outside of the Stockade. After the completion of my 
labors in the military prison hospital, the following communi- 
cation was addressed to Brigadier General John II. Winder, in 
consequence of the refusal on the part of the commandant of 
the interior of the Confederate States Military Prison to admit 
me within the Stockade upon the order of the Surgeon Gen- 
eral : 

Camp Sumter, Andersonville, Ga., ) 
September IG, 18G4. \ 

General,: — I respectfully request the commandant of the post of Ander- 
sonville to grant me permission and to furnish the necessary pa-s to visit the 
sick and medical officers within the Stockade of the Confederate States 
Prison. I desire to institute certain inquiries ordered by the Surgeon Gen- 
eral. Surj^eon Isaiah H. White, Chief Surgeon of the post, and Surgeon. 
R. R. Stevenson, in charge of the Prison Hospital, have afforded me every 



A 8T0EY OF KEBEL MILrPART PKIS0N3. 301 

facility for the prosecution of my labors among the sick outside of the 
Stockade. Very respectfully, your obedient servant, 

JOSEPH JONES, Surgeon P. A. C. S. 
Brigadier General John H. Windek, 

Commandant, Post Andersonville. 

In the absence of General Winder from tlie post, Captain 
Winder furnished the foUowinof order : 



C5 



Camp Sumter, Andeksontille, ) 
September 17, 1864. f 

CAPTAm : — Tou will permit Surgeon Joseph Jones, who has orders from 

the Surgeon General, to visit the sick within the Stockade that are under 

medical treatment. Surgeon Jones is ordered to make cert.'\in investigations 

which may prove useful to his profession. By direction of General Winder, 

Very respectfully, 

W. S. WINDER, A. A. 0. 
Captain H. Wikz, Commanding Prison. 

Description of tlie Confederate States Military Prison Hospital at Andersonville. 
Number of prisoners, physical condition, food, clothing, habits, moral condition, 
diseases. 

The Confederate Military Prison at Andersonville, Ga., con- 
sists of a strong Stockade, twenty feet in height, enclosing 
twenty-seven acres. The Stockade is formed of strong pine 
logs, firmly planted in the ground. The main Stockade is sur- 
rounded by two other similar rows of pine logs, the middle 
Stockade being sixteen feet high, and the outer twelve feet. 
These are intended for offense and defense. If the inner 
Stockade should at any time be forced by the prisoners, the 
second forms another line of defense; while in case of an 
attempt to deliver the prisoners by a force operating upon the 
exterior, the outer line forms an admirable protection to the 
Confederate troops, and a most formidable obstacle to cavalry 
or infant,ry. The four angles of the outer line are strengthened 
by earthworks upon commanding eminences, from which the 
cannon, in case of an outbreak among the prisoners, may sweep 
the entire enclosure; and it was designed to connect these 
works by a line of rifle pits, running zig-zag, around the outer 
Stockade; those rifle pits have never been completed. The 
ground enclosed by the innermost Stockade lies in tl^^ form of 
a parallelogram, the larger diameter running almost due north. 



302 



AITOEKSONYILLE. 



and south. This space includes the northern and southern 
opposing sides of t^v^o hills, bet^yeen which a stream of water 
runs from west to east. The surface soil of these hills is com- 
posed chiefly of sand with varying admixtures of clay and 
oxide of iron. The clay is sufficiently tenacious to give a con- 
siderable degree of consistency to the soil. The internal 
structure of the hills, as revealed by the dee\) ^vclls, is similar 
to that already described. The alternate layers of clay and 
sand, as well as the oxide of iron, which forms in its various 
combinations a cement to the sand, allow of extensive tunnel- 
ling. The prisoners not only constructed numerous dirt huts • 
with balls of clay and sand, taken from the wells which they 
have excavated all over those hills, but they have also, in some 
cases, tunneled extensively from these wells. The lower por- 
tions of these hills, bordering on the stream, are wet and boggy 
from the constant oozing of water. The Stockade was built 
originally to accommodate only ten thousand prisoners, and 
included at first seventeen acres. Near the close of the month 
of June the area was enlarged by the addition of ten acres. 
The ground added was situated on the northern slope of the 
largest hill. 

The following table presents a view of the density of the 
population of the prison at different periods : 

Table illustrating the mean number of prisoners confined in the Confederate 
States military prison at Andersonville, Georgia, from its organization, Feb- 
ruary 2\.,\%^i, to September, 1864, and the average number of square feet of 
ground to each prisoner. ^ 



MoNxn AiTD Yeab. 



March, 1864. 
April, 1864.. 
May, 1864... 
June, 1864... 
July, 1864... 
August, 1864 



*- • 




o i2 








.c S 


f^ -»_» 






bti'o 


o S 


IS. 


«2o 


=.g 


^2 


|2 




7,5no 


740,520 


10,000 


740.520 


15,0110 


740.520 


22,201 


740,520 


2i),0;i0 


1,176,120 


32,899 


1,176,120 



c3 - 
»- S =3 

« S 5; 

E-3i 



a g,55 



98.7 

74 

49.3 

33.2 

40.5 

35.7 



Within the circumscribed area of the Stockade the Federal 
prisoners were compelled to perform all the offices of life — 



A STORY OF KEBEi. MlJ.llAKV I'KISOJSS. 303 

cooking, washing, the calls of nature, exercise, and sleeping. 
During the month of March the prison was less crowded than 
at any subsequent time, and then the average space of ground 
to each prisoner was only 98.7 feet, or less than seven square 
yards. The Federal prisoners were gathered from all parts of 
the Confederate States east of the Mississippi, and crowded 
into the confined space, until in the month of June the average 
number of square feet of ground to each prisoner was only 33.2 
or less than four square yards. These figures represent the 
condition of the Stockade in a better light even than it really 
was ; for a considerable breadth of land along the stream, flow- 
ing from west to east between the hills, was low and boggy, 
and was covered with the excrement of the men, and thus ren- 
dered wholly uninhabitable, and in fact useless for every pur- 
pose except that of defecation. The pines and other small trees 
and shrubs, which originally were scattered sparsely over these 
hills, were in a short time cut down and consumed by the pris- 
oners for firewood, and no shade tree was left in the entire 
enclosure of the stockade. With their characteristic industry 
and ingenuity, the Federals constructed for themselves small 
huts and caves, and attempted to shield themselves from the 
rain and sun and night damps and dew. But few tents were 
distributed to the prisoners, and those were in most cases torn 
and rotten. In the location and arrangement of these tents 
and huts no order appears to have been followed ; in. fact, regu- 
lar streets appear to be out of the question in so crowded an 
area; especially too, as large bodies of prisoners were from 
time to time added suddenly without any previous preparations. 
The irregular arrangement of the huts and imperfect shelters 
was very unfavorable for the maintenance of a proper system 
of police. 

The police and internal economy of the prison was left almost 
entirely in the hands of the prisoners themselves ; the duties of 
the Confederate soldiers acting as guards being limited to the 
occupation of the boxes or lookouts ranged around the stockade 
at regular intervals, and to the manning of the batteries at the 
angles of the prison. Even judicial matters pertaining to them- ' 
selves, as the detection and punishment of such crimes as theft 
and murder appear to have been in a great measure abandoned 



304 AKDEESONVILLI. 

to the prisoners. A strikins: instance of this occurred in the 
month of July, when the Federal prisoners within the Stockade 
tried, condemned, and hanged six (6) of their own number, who 
had been convicted of stealing and of robbing and murdering 
their fellow-prisoners. They were all hung upon the same day, 
and thousands of the prisoners gathered around to witness the 
execution. The Confederate authorities are said not to have 
interfered with these proceedings. In this collection of men 
from all parts of the world, every phase of human character was 
represented ; the stronger preyed upon the weaker, and even 
the sick who were unable to defend themselves were robbed of 
their scanty supplies of food and clothing. Dark stories were 
afloat, of men, both sick and well, who were murdered at night, 
strangled to death by their comrades for scant supplies of cloth- 
ing or money. I heard a sick and wounded Federal prisoner 
accuse his nurse, a fellow-prisoner of the United States Army, 
of having stealthily, during his sleep inoculated liis wounded 
arm with gangrene, that he might destroy his life and fall heir 
to his clothing. 

The large number of men confined within^the Stockade soon, 
under a defective system of police, and with imperfect arrange- 
ments, covered the surface of the low grounds with excrements. 
The sinks over the lower portions of the stream were imperfect 
in their plan and structure, and the excrements were in large 
measure deposited so near the borders of the stream as not to 
be washed away, or else accumulated upon tlie low boggy 
ground. The volume of water was not sufficient to wash away 
the feces, and they accumulated in such quantities in the lower 
portion of tlie stream as to form a mass of liquid excrement. 
Heavy rains caused the water of tlie stream to rise, and as the 
arrangements for the passage of the increased amounts of 
water 6ut of the Stockade were insufficient, the liquid feces 
overflowed the low grounds and covered them several inches, 
after the subsidence of the waters. The action of tlie sun 
upon this putrefying mass of excrements and fragments of 
bread and meat and bones excited most rapid fermentation 
and developed a horrible stench. Improvements were projected 
for tlie removal of the filth and for the prevention of its accu- 



A STORY OF KEiJEL MILITARY PRISONS. 305 

mulation, but they were only partially and imperfectly carried 
out. As the forces of the prisoners were reduced by confine- 
ment, want of exercise, improper diet, and by scurvy, diarrhea, 
and dysentery, they were unable to evacuate their bowels 
vnthin the stream or along its banks, and the excrements were 
deposited at the very doors of their tents. The vast majority 
appeared to lose all repulsion to filth, and both sick and Avell 
disregarded all the laws of hygiene and personal cleanliness. 
The accommodations for the sick were imperfect and insufficient. 
From the organization of the j)rison, February 24, 1864, to 
May 22, the sick were treated within the Stockade. In the 
crowded condition of the Stockade, and with the tents and huts 
clustered thickly around the hospital, it was impossible to secure 
proper ventilation or to maintain the necessary police. The 
Federal prisoners also made frequent forays upon the hospital 
stores and carried off the food and clothing of the sick. The 
hospital was, on the 22d of May, removed to its present site 
without the Stockade, and five acres of ground covered with 
oaks and pines approprated to the use of the sick. 

The supply of medical officers has been insufficient from the 
foundation of the prison. 

The nurses and attendants upon the sick have been most gen- 
erally Federal prisoners, "vvho in too many cases appear to have 
been devoid of moral principle, and who not only neglected 
their duties, but were also engaged in extensive robbing of the 
sick. 

From the want of proper police and hygienic regulations 
alone it is not wonderful that from February 24 to September 
21, 1864, nine thousand four hundred and seventy-nine deaths, 
nearly one-third the entire number of prisoners, should have 
been recorded. I found the Stockade and Hospital in the fol- 
lowing condition during my pathological investigations, insti- 
tuted in the month of September, 1864: 

STOCKADE, CONFEDERATE STATES MILITARY PRISON. 

At the time of my visit to Andersonville a large number of 
Federal prisoners had been removed to Millen, Savannah, 
Charleston, and other parts of the Confederacy, in anticipation 

20 



306 AITDERSONVTLLB 

of an advance of General Sherman's forces from Atlanta, with 
the design of liberating their captive brethren ; however, about 
fifteen thousand prisoners remained confined within the limits 
of the Stockade and Confederate States Mihtary Prison Hos- 
pital. 

In the Stockade, with the exception of the damp lowlands 
borderins: the small stream, the surface was covered Avith huts, 
and small ragged tents and parts of blankets and fragments of 
oil-cloth, coats, and blankets stretched upon sticks. The tents 
and huts were not arranged according to any order, and there 
was in most parts of the enclosure scarcely room for two men 
to walk abreast between the tents and huts. 

If one might judge from the large pieces of corn-bread scat- 
tered about in every direction on the ground the prisoners were 
either very lavishly supplied with this article of diet, or else this 
kind of food was not relished by them. 

Each day the dead from the Stockade were carried out by 
their fellow-prisoners and deposited upon the ground under a 
bush arbor, just outside of the Southwestern Gate. From 
thence they were carried in carts to the burying ground, one- 
quarter of a mile northwest of the Prison. The dead were 
buried without coffins, side by side, in trenches four feet deep. 

The low grounds bordering the stream were covered with 
human excrements and filth of all kinds, which in many places 
appeared to be alive with working maggots. An indescribable 
sickening stench arose from these fermenting masses of human 
filth. 

There were near five thousand seriously ill Federals in the 
Stockade and Confederate States Militar}^ Prison Hospital, and 
the deaths exceeded one hundred per day, and large numbers of 
the prisoners who were walking about, and who had not been 
entered upon the sick reports, were sufi'ering from severe and 
incurable diarrhea, dysentery, and scurvy. The sick were 
attended almost entirely by their feUow-prisoners, appointed as 
nurses, and as they received but little attention, they were com- 
pelled to exert themselves at all times to attend to the calls of 
nature, and hence they retained the power of moving about to 
within a comparatively short period of the close of life. Owing 



A STORY OF REBEL MILITARY PRISONS. 



307 



to the sloAV progress of the diseases most prevalent, diarrhea 
and chronic dysentery, the corpses were as a general rule 
emaciated. 

I visited two thousand sick within the Stockade, Iving under 




djK 

BURYIKG THE DEAD. 
(From a Rebel photograph in possession of the Author.) 

some long sheds which had been built at the northern portion 

for themselves. At this time only one medical officer was in 

attendance, whereas at least twenty medical officers should have 

been employed. 

*** ***** 

Died in the Stockade from its organization, February 24, 1864 to September 21 3,254 

Died in Hospital during same time - 6,225 

Total deaths in Hospital and Stockade 9,479 

Scurvy, diarrhea, dysentery, and hospital gangrene were the 
prevailing diseases. I was surprised to find but few cases of 
malarial fever, and no well-marked cases either of typhus or 
typhoid fever. The absence of the different forms of malarial 
fever may be accounted for in the supposition that the artificial 
atmosphere of the Stockade, crowded densely with imman 



308 iLNDERSONVILLK. 

beings and loaded with animal exhalations, was unfavorable to 
the existence and action of the malarial poison. The absence 
of typhoid and typhus fevers amongst all the causes Avhich are 
supposed to generate these diseases, appeared to be due to the 
fact that the great majority of these prisoners had been in cap- 
tivity in Yirginiaj at Belle Island, and in other parts of the 
Confederacy for months, and even as long as two years, and 
during this time they had been subjected to the same bad influ- 
ences, and those who had not had these fevers before either had 
them during their confinement in Confederate prisons or else 
their systems, from long exposure, were proof against their 
action. 

The efi'ects of scurvy were manifested on every hand, and in 
all its various stages, from the muddy, pale complexion, pale 
gums, feeble, languid muscular motions, lowness of spirits, and 
fetid breath, to the dusky, dirty, leaden complexion, swollen 
features, spongy, purple, livid, fungoid, bleeding gums, loose 
teeth, oedematous limbs, covered with hvid vibices, and petechias 
spasmodically flexed, painful and hardened extremities, sponta- 
neous hemorrhages from mucous canals, and large, ill-condi- 
tioned, spreading ulcers covered with a dark purplish fungus 
growth. I observed that in some of the cases of scurvy the 
parotid glands were greatly swollen, and in some instances to 
such an extent as to preclude entirely the power to articulate. 
In several cases of dropsy of the abdomen and lower extreme- 
ties supervening upon scurvy, the patients affirmed that pre- 
viously to the appearance of the dropsy they had suffered with 
profuse and obstinate diarrhea, and that when this was checked 
by a change of diet, from Indian corn-bread baked with the 
huslc, to boiled rice, the dropsy appeared. The severe pains 
and livid patches were frequentl}'' associated with sAveUings in 
various parts, and especiall}'" in the lower extremities, accompan- 
ied with stiffness and contractions of the knee joints and ankles, 
and often with a brawny feel of the parts, as if lymph had been 
effused between the integuments and apeneuroses, preventing 
the motion of the skin over the swollen parts. Many of the pris- 
oners believed that the scurvy was contagious, and I saw men 
guarding their wells and springs, fearing lest some man suffer- 
ing with the scurvy might use the water and thus poison them. 



A STOBT OF EEBEL MILITAET PKISONS. 309 

I observed also nmnerous cases of hospital gangrene, and of 
spreading scorbutic ulcers, which had supervened upon slight 
injuries. The scorbutic ulcers presented a darlv, purple fungoid, 
elevated surface, with Uvid swoUen edges, and exuded a thin, 
fetid, sanious fluid, instead of pus. Many ulcers which origi- 
nated from the scorbutic condition of the system appeared to 
become truly gangrenous, assuming aU the characteristics of 
hospital gangrene. From the crowded condition, filthy habits, 
bad diet, and dejected, depressed condition of the prisoners, 
their systems had become so disordered that the smallest abra- 
son of the skin, from the rubbing of a shoe, or from the effects 
of the sun, or from the prick of a splinter, or from scratching, 
or a musketo bite, in some cases, took on rapid and frightful 
ulceration and gangrene. The long use of salt meat, ofttimes 
imperfectly cured, as well as. the most total deprivation of veg- 
etables and fruit, appeared to be the chief causes of the scurvy. 
I carefuUy examined the bakery and the bread furnished the 
prisoners, -and found that they were supplied almost entirely 
with corn-bread from which the husk had not been separated. 
This husk acted as an irritant to the alimentary canal, ^vithout 
adding any nutriment to the bread. As far as my examination 
extended no fault could be found with the mode in which the 
bread was baked ; the difficulty lay in the failure to separate 
the husk from the corn-meal. I strongly urged the preparation of 
large quantities of soup made from the cow and calves' heads 
with the brains and tongues, to which a liberal supply of sweet 
potatos and vegetables might have been advantageously added. 
The material existed in abundance for the preparation of such 
soup in large quantities with but little additional expense. 
Such aliment would have been not only highly nutritious, but 
it would also have acted as an efficient remedial agent for 
the removal of the scorbutic condition. The sick within the 
Stockade lay under several long sheds which were originally 
built for barracks. These sheds covered two floors which were 
open on all sides. The sick la}'^ upon the bare boards, or upon 
such ragged blankets as they possessed, without, as far as I 
observed, any bedding or even straw. 

The haggard, distressed countenances of these miserable, com- 



310 ANDERSON VILLK. 

plaining, dejected, living skeletons, crying foi- niedicul aid and 
food, and cursing their Government for its refusal to exchange 
prisoners, and the ghastly coi^^ses, with their glazed eye balls 
staring up into vacant space, with the flies swarming down 
their open and grinning mouths, and over their ragged clothes, 
infested with numerous lice, as they lay amongst the sick and 
dying, formed a picture of helpless, hopeless misery which it 
would be impossible to portray by words oi- by the brush. A 
feeling of disappointment and even resentment on account of 
the United States Government upon the subject of the exchange 
of prisoners, appeared to be widespread, and the apparent hope- 
less nature of the negotiations for some general exchange of 
prisoners appeared to be a cause of universal regret and deep 
and injurious despondency. I heard some of the prisoners go 
so far as to exonerate the Confederate Government J'rom any 
charge of intentionall}'' subjecting them to a protracted conline- 
ment, with its necessary and unavoidable suli'erings, in a coun- 
try cut off from all intercourse with foreign nations, and sorely 
pressed on all sides, whilst on the other hand they chai-ged 
their prolonged captivity upon their own Government, which 
was attempting to make the negro equal to tlie white man. 
Some hundred or more of the prisoners had been released from 
confinement in the Stockade on parole, and filled various offices 
as clerks, druggists, and carpenters, etc., in the various depart- 
ments. These men were well clothed, and presented a stout 
and healthy appearance, and as a general rule they presented a 
much more robust and healthy appearance than the Confederate 
troops guarding the prisoners. 

The entire grounds are surrounded by a frail board fence, 
and are strictly guarded by Confederate soldiers, and no pris- 
oner except the paroled attendants is allowed to leave the 
grounds except by a special permit from the Commandant of 
the Interior of the Prison. 

The patients and attendants, near two thousaiul in number, 
are crowded into this confined space and are but poorly sup- 
phed with old and ragged tents. Large numbers of them were 
without any bunks in the tents, and lay upon the ground, 
oft-times without even a blanket. No beds or straw appeared 



A 6TOKV OF KKBEL MILITAKY PRISONS. 311 

bo have been furnished. The tents extend to within a few 
yards of the small stream, the eastern portion of which, as we 
have before said, is used as a privy and is loaded with excre- 
ments; and I observed a large pile of corn-bread, bones, and 
filth of all kinds, thirty feet in diameter and several feet in 
hight, swarming with myriads of flies, in a vacant space near 
the pots used for cooldng. Millions of flies swarmed over 
everything, and covered the faces of the sleeping patients, and 
crawled down their open mouths, and deposited their maggots 
in the gangrenous wounds of the living, and in the mouths of 
the dead. Musketos in great numbers also infested the tents, 
and many of the patients were so stung by these pestiferous 
insects, that they resembled those suffering from a slight attack 
of the measles. 

The police and hygiene of the hospital were defective in the 
extreme; the attendants, who appeared in almost every 
instance to have been selected from the prisoners, seemed to 
have in many cases but little interest in the welfare of their 
fellow-captives. The accusation was ijiade that the nurses in 
many cases robbed the sick of their clothing, money, and rations, 
and carried on a clandestine trade with the paroled j)risoners and 
Confederate guards without the hospital enclosure, in the cloth- 
ing, effects of the sick, dying, and dead Federals. They certainly 
appeared to neglect the comfort and cleanliness of the sick 
intrusted to their care in a most shameful manner, even after 
making due allowances for the difficulties of the situation. 
Many of the sick were literally encrusted- with dirt and lilth 
and covered with vermin. When a gangrenous wound needed 
washing, the limb was thrust out a little from the blanket, or 
board, or rags upon which the patient was lying, and water 
poured over it, and all the putrescent matter allowed to soak 
into the ground floor of the tent. The supply of rags for dress- 
ing wounds was said to be very scant, and I saw the most filthy 
rags which had been applied several times, and imperfectly 
washed, used in dressing wounds. Where hospital gangrene 
was prevailing, it was impossible for any wound to escape con- 
tagion under these circumstances. The results of the treatment 
of wounds in the hospital were of the most unsatisfactory char- 



312 



ANDEESONVILLE. 



acter, from this neglect of cleanliness, in the dressings and 
wounds themselves, as well as from various other causes which 
will be more fully considered. I saw several gangrenous 
wounds filled with maggots. I have frequently seen neglected 
wounds amongst the Confederate soldiers similarly aifected; 




HIE ORAVEYAKT) AT ANDERSONVILLE AS THE REBELS LEFT IT. 
(From a Rebel photograph in possession of the Author.) 

and as far as my experience extends, these worms destroy only 
the dead tissues and do not injure specially the well parts. I 
have even heard surgeons athrm that a gangrenous wound 
which had been thoroughly cleansed by maggots, healed more 
rapidly than if it had been left to itself. This "want of cleanli- 
ness on the part of the nurses appeared to be the result of care- 
lessness and inattention, rather than of malignant design, and 
the whole trouble can be traced to the want of the proper 



A STORY OF REBEL MILITART PRISONS. 313 

police and sanitary regulations, and to the absence of intelligent 
organization and division of labor. The abuses were in a large 
measure due to the almost total absence of system, govern- 
ment, and rigid, but wholesome sanitar}'- regulations. In 
extenuation of these abuses it was alleged by the medical offi- 
cers that the Confederate troops were barely sufficient to guard 
the prisoners, and that it was impossible to obtain any number 
of experienced nurses from the Confederate forces. In fact the 
guard appeared to be too small, even for the regulation of the 
internal hygiene and police of the hospital. 

The manner of disposing of the dead was also calculated to 
depress the already desponding spirits of these men, many of 
whom have been confined for months, and even for nearly two 
years in Richmond and other places, and whose strength had 
been wasted by bad air, bad food, and neglect of personal clean- 
liness. The dead-house is merely a frame covered with old 
tent cloth and a few bushes, situated in the southwestern corner 
of the hospital grounds. When a patient dies, he is simply laid 
in the narrow street in front of his tent, until he is removed by 
Federal negros detailed to carry off the dead ; if a patient dies 
dm'ing the night, he lies there until the morning, and during 
the day even the dead were frequently allowed to remain for 
hom's in these walks. In the dead-house the corpses lie upon 
the bare ground, and were in most cases covered with filth and 
vermin. 

The cooking arrangements are of the most defective character- 
Five large iron pots similar to those used for boiling sugar cane, 
appeared to be the only cooking utensils furnished by the hos- 
pital for the cooking of nearly two thousand men ; and the 
patients were dependent in great measure upon their own mis- 
erable utensils. They were allowed to cook in the tent doors 
and in the lanes, and this was another source of filth, and 
another favorable condition for the generation and multiplica- 
tion of flies and other vermin. 

The air of the tents was foul and disagreeable in the extreme, 
and in fact the entire grounds emitted a most nauseous and dis- 
gusting smell. I entered nearly all the tents and carefully 



314 ANDEKSONVILLE. 

examined the cases of interest, and especially the cases of gan- 
grene, upon numerous occasions, during the prosecution of my 
pathological inquiries at Andersonville, and therefore enjoyed 
every opportunity to judge correctly of the hygiene and police 
of the hospital. 

There appeared to be almost absolute indifference and neg 
lect on the part of the patients of personal cleanUness ; their 
persons and clothing in most instances, and especially of those 
suffering with gangrene and scorbutic ulcers, were filthy in the 
extreme and covered with vermin. It was too often the case 
that patients were received from the Stockade in a most deplor- 
able condition. I have seen men brought in from the Stockade 
in a dying condition, begrimed from head to foot with their 
own excrements, and so black from smoke and filth that they 
resembled negros rather than white men. That this descrip- 
tion of the Stockade and hospital has not been overdi-awn, will 
appear from the reports of the surgeons in charge, appended to 
this report. 

******* 

We will examine first the consolidated report of the sick and 
wounded Federal prisoners. During six months, from the 1st 
of March to the 31st of August, forty-two thousand six hun- 
dred and eighty-six cases of diseases and wounds were reported. 
No classified record of the sick in the Stockade was kept after 
the establishment of the hospital without the Prison. This 
fact, in conjunction with those already presented relating to 
the insufficiency of medical olficers and the extreme illness and 
even death of many prisoners in the tents in the Stockade, 
without any medical attention or record beyond the bare num- 
ber of the dead, demonstrate that these figures, large as they 
appear to be, are far below the truth. 

As the number of prisoners varied greatly at different periods, 
the relations between those reported sick and well, as far as 
those statistics extend, can best be determined by a comparison 
of the statistics of each month. The following table presents 
the mean strength, the total diseases and deaths, and the total 
ca-ses and deaths of the most fatal diseases : 



A STORY OF KEBEL MILITARY PRISONS. 



315 



Table ilhistraiivg the mean strength, total cases of disease and death, and (he rela. 
tions of the cases and deaths of the most fatal diseases among the Federal pris- 
oners confined at Andersonville, Ga. (Consolidated from the original reports 
on file in the office of the Surgeon in charge of the post of Andersonville, by 
Joseph Jones, Surgeon Provisional Army Confederate States.) 





1864. 




March. 


AprU. 


May. 


June. 


July. 


August. 


Total. 


Mean strength, Federal prisoners . . 
Total taken sick or wounded dur- 
ing the month . . . 


7,500 

1,530 

4 9-10 

283 

18.42 

26.4 

3.77 

67 
28 


10,000 

2,425 

4 8-100 

576 

23.7 

17.3 

5.76 

56 
18 

5 


15,000 

8,583 

17-10 

708 

8.2 

21.18 

4.72 

92 

17 

1 
1 

481 
885 


22,291 

7,968 
2 8-10 
1,201 

15.0 

18.5 

5.38 

18 
32 

2" 

205 

7 

1C2 


29,(^30 

10,834 
2 6-10 
1,952 

18.1 

14.8 

6.64 

39 
58 

1 
2 

150 
7 

139 


32,899 

11,346 
2 9-10 
2,992 

26.3 

10.9 

9.09 

200 
32 

1 
1 

324 

29 


42,686 


Ratio of sick to well; one sick in- 
Total deaths from all causes 

Per cent, of deaths to sick entered 

on sick reports during month 

One death in so many sick and 


'Per cent, of deaths to mean strength, 




Typhoid ie\-er— 


471 


Deaths 


185 


•CongeF-:ive fever — 


8 


Deaths 




6 


Intermittent fever, quotidian- 
Cases 




10 
4 

24 


1,170 
66 


Deaths 




Intermittent fever, tertian- 


35 
2 


775 




3 


Intermittent fever, quartern — 




114 


25 


56 




195 










Remittent fever- 


37 
5 


10 

1 


181 
9 


240 
13 






468 








28 


Bilious remittent fever- 


160 
15 

28 
27 

3,092 
195 

2,796 
517 

349 
330 

999 
215 

180 
27 

203 

181 

304 
66 


190 
12 

116 
15 

3,026 
722 

1,982 
792 

520 
280 

859 
364 

187 
72 

156 
156 

665 
120 


850 


Deaths 










27 


Pneumonia — 


102 
65 

15 


108 
58 

50 


103 
28 

1,221 
14 

1,729 
251 

608 
171 

870 
93 

407 
8 

6 
3 

233 

50 


21 

41 

2,097 
68 

1,966 
330 

510 
447 

540 
98 

271 
5 

9 

8 

248 
71 


528 




234 


Scurvy- 


9,501 




699 


Acute diarrhoea — 


386 
51 

95 
26 

143 

29 

42 
12 


916 
220 

235 
115 

133 
49 

51 

27 

100 

32 
6 


9,776 




2,161 


Ohronic diarrhoea- 


2,315 




1,369 


Acute dysentery- 


3,549 




848 


Chronic dysentery— 


1,138 
151 




Morbiben — 


474 




17 

28 
2 


665 




1,610 
815 









During this period of six months no less than five hundred 
and sixty-five deaths are recorded under the head of morbi 
vanie. In other words, those men died without having received 



316 AITDEESONVILLE. 

sufficient medical attention for the determination of even the 
name of the disease causing death. 

During the month of August fifty-three cases and fifty-three 
deaths are recorded as due to marasmus. Surely this large 
number of deaths must have been due to some other morbid 
state than slow wasting. If they were due to improper and 
insufficient food, they should have been classed accordingly, 
and if to diarrhea or dysentery or scurvy, the classification 
should in like manner have been explicit. 

"We observe a progressive increase of the rate of mortality, 
from 3.11 per cent, in March to 9.09 percent, of mean strength, 
sick and well, in August. The ratio of mortality continued to 
increase during September, for notwithstanding the removal of 
one-half of the entire number of prisoners during the early 
portion of the month, one thousand seven hundred and sixty- 
seven (1,767) deaths are registered from September 1 to 21, and 
the largest number of deaths upon any one day occurred during 
this month, on the 16th, viz. : one hundred and nineteen. 

The entire number of Federal prisoners confined at Anderson- 
viUe was about forty thousand six hundred and eleven ; and dur 
ing the period of near seven months, from February 21 to Septem- 
ber 21, nine thousand four hundred and seventy-nine (9,479) 
deaths were recorded ; that is, during this period near one-fourth, 
or more, exactly one in 4.2, or £3.3 per cent., terminated fatally. 
This increase of mortality was due in great measure to the 
accumulation of the sources of disease, as the increase of excre- 
ments and filth of all kinds, and the concentration of noxious 
effluvia, and also to the progressive effects of salt diet, crowding, 
and the hot climate. 

CONCLUSIONS. 

1st. The great mortality among the Federal prisoners con- 
fined in the military prison at Andersonville was not referable 
to cHmatic causes, or to the nature of the soil and waters. 

2d. The chief causes of death were scurvy and its results and 
bowel affections — chronic and acute diarrhea and dysentery. 
The bowel affections appear to have been due to the diet, the 
habits of the patients, the depressed, dejected state of the ner- 
vous system and moral and intellectual powers, and to th© 



A 8T0EY OF REBEL MILITAliY PRISONS. 317 

effluvia arising from the decomposing animal and vegetable 
filth. The effects of salt meat, and an unvarying diet of corn- 
meal, with but few vegetables, and imperfect supphes of vinegar 
and syrup, were manifested in the great prevalence of scurvy. 
This disease, without doubt, was also influenced to an important 
extent in its origin and course by the foul animal emanations. 

3d. From the sameness of the food and form, the action of 
the poisonous gases in the densely crowded and filthy Stockade 
and hospital, the blood was altered in its constitution, even 
before the manifestation of actual disease. In both the well 
and the sick the red corpuscles were diminished ; and in all 
diseases uncomplicated with inflammation, the fibrous element 
was deficient. In cases of ulceration of the mucous membrane 
of the intestinal canal, the fibrous element of the blood was 
increased ; while in simple diarrhea, uncomplicated with ulcera- 
tion, it was either diminished or else remained stationary. 
Heart clots were very common, if not universally present, in 
cases of ulceration of the intestinal mucous membrane, while 
in the uncomplicated cases of diarrhea and scurvy, the blood 
was fluid and did not coagulate readil}^, and the heart clots and 
fibrous concretions were almost universally absent. From the 
watery condition of the blood, there resulted various serous 
effusions into the pericardium, ventricles of the brain, and into 
the abdomen. In almost all the cases which I examined after 
death, even the most emaciated, there was more or less serous 
effusion into the abdominal cavity. In cases of hospital gan- 
grene of the extremities, and in cases of gangrene of the 
intestines, heart clots and fibrous coagula were universally 
present. The presence of those clots in the cases of hospital 
gangrene, while they were absent in the cases in whicli there 
was no inflammatory symptoms, sustains the conclusion that 
hospital gangrene is a species of inflammation, imperfect and 
irregular though it may be in its progress, in which the fibrous 
element and coagulation of the blood are increased, even in 
those who are suffering from such a condition of the blood, 
and from such diseases as are naturally accompanied with a 
decrease in the fibrous constituent. 

4th. The fact tliat hospital ^^-angrene appeared in the Stockade 
first, and original<^(i spMiitaiuM.UNly \\''it})oiit any pj-evious con- 



318 AITOERSONVILLB. 

tagion, and occurred sporadically all over the Stockade and 
prison hospital, was proof positive that this disease will arise 
whenever the conditions of crowding, filth, foul air, and bad 
diet are present. The exhalations from the hospital and 
Stockade appeared to exert their effects to a considerable dis- 
tance outside of these localities. The origin of hospital gan- 
grene among these prisoners appeared clearly to depend in 
great measure upon the state of the general system induced oy 
diet, and various external noxious influences. The rapidity of 
the appearance and action of the gangrene depended upon the 
powers and state of the constitution, as well as upon the inten- 
sity of the poison in the atmosphere, or upon the direct appli- 
cation of poisonous matter to the wounded surface. This was 
further illustrated by the important fact that hospital gangrene, 
or a disease resembling it in all essential respects, attacked the 
intestinal canal of patients laboring under ulceration of the 
bowels, although there were no local manifestations of gangrene 
upon the surface of the body. This mode of termination in 
cases of dysentery was quite common in the foul atmosphere of 
the Confederate States Military Hospital, in the depressed, 
depraved condition of the system of these Federal prisoners. 

5th. A scorbutic condition of the system appeared to favor 
the origin of foul ulcers, which frequently took on true hospital 
gangrene. Scurvy and hospital gangrene frequently existed 
in the same individual. In such cases, vegetable diet, with 
vegetable acids, would remove the scorbutic condition without 
curing the hospital gangrene. From the results of the existing 
war for the establishment of the independence of the Confede- 
rate States, as well as from the published observations of Dr. 
Trotter, Sir Gilbert Blane, and others of the English navy and 
army, it is evident that the scorbutic condition of the system, 
especially in crowded ships and camps, is most favorable to the 
origin and spread of foul ulcers and hospital gangrene. As in 
the present case of Andersonville, so also in past times when 
medical hygiene was almost entirely neglected, those two 
diseases were almost universally associated in crowded ships. 
In many cases it was very difficult to decide at first whether 
the ulcer was a simple result of scurvy or of the action of the 
prison or hospital gangrene, for there was great similarity m 



▲ 8T0BT OF EEBEL MILITAKY PRISONS. 319 

the appearance of the ulcers in the two diseases. So commonly 
have those two diseases been combined in their origin and 
action, that the description of scorbutic ulcers, by many authors, 
evidently includes also many of the prominent characteristics 
of hospital gangrene. This will be rendered evident by an 
examination of the observations of Dr. Lind and Sir Gilbert 
Blane upon scorbutic ulcers. 

6th. Gangrenous s])ots followed by rapid destruction of tissue' 
appeared in some cases where there had been no known wound. 
"Without such well-established facts, it might be assumed that 
the disease was propagated from one patient to another. In 
such a filthy and crowded hospital as that of the Confederate 
States Military Prison at Andersonville, it was impossible to 
isolate the wounded from the sources of actual contact of the- 
gangrenous matter. The flies swarming over the wounds and 
over filth of every kind, the filthy, imperfectly washed and 
scanty supplies of rags, and the limited supply of washing^ 
utensils, the same wash-bowl serving for scores of patients, 
were sources of such constant circulation of the gangrenous 
matter that the disease might rapidly spread from a single gan- 
grenous wound. The fact already stated, that a form of moist 
gangrene, resembling hospital gangrene, was quite common in 
this foul atmosphere, in cases of dysentery, both with and with- 
out the existence of the disease upon the entire surface, not only 
demonstrates the dependence of the disease upon the state of 
the constitution, but proves in the clearest manner that neither 
the contact of the poisonous matter of gangrene, nor the direct 
action of the poisonous atmosphere upon the ulcerated surface- 
is necessary to the development of the disease. 

7th. In this foul atmosphere amputation did not arrest hos- 
pital gangrene ; the disease almost invariably returned. Almost 
every amputation was followed finally by death, either from 
the effects of gangrene or from the prevailing diarrhea and - 
dysentery. Nitric acid and esciiarotics generally in this 
crowded atmosphere, loaded with noxious effluvia, exerted only 
temporary effects ; after their application to the diseased sur- 
faces, the gangrene would frequently return with redoubled 
energy; and even after the gangrene had been completely 
removed by local and constitutional treatment, it would fre- 



320 AXDEESONYILLE. 

quently return and destroy the patient. As far as my observ- 
ation extended, very few of the cases of amputation for gan- 
grene recovered. The progress of these cases was frequently 
very deceptive, I have observed after death the most exten- 
sive disorganization of the structm^es of the stump, when dur- 
ing life there was but little swelling of the part, and the patient 
was apparently doing well. I endeavored to impress upon the 
medical officers the view that in this disease treatment was 
almost useless, without an abundant supply of pure, fresh air, 
nutritious food, and tonics and stimulants. Such changes, how- 
ever, as would allow of the isolation of the cases of hospital 
gangrene appeared to be out of the power of the medical officers. 

8th. The gangrenous mass was without true pus, and con- 
sisted chiefly of broken-down, disorganized structures. The 
reaction of the gangrenous matter in certain stages was alkaUne. 

9th. The best, and in truth the only means of protecting 
large armies and navies, as well as prisoners, from the ravages 
of hospital gangrene, is to furnish liberal supplies of well-cured 
meat, together with fresh beef and vegetables, and to enforce a 
rigid system of hygiene. 

10th. Finally, this gigantic mass of human misery calls loudly 
for relief, not only for the sake of suffering humanity, but also 
on account of our own brave soldiers now captives in the hands 
of the Federal Government. Strict justice to the gallant men 
of the Confederate Armies, who have been or wlio may be, so 
unfortunate as to be compelled to surrender in battle, demands 
that the Confederate Government should adopt that course 
which will best secure their health and comfort in captivit}'- ; or 
at least leave their enemies without a shadow of an excuse for 
any violation of the rules of civilized warfare in tlie treatment 
of prisoners. 

[End of the Witness's Testimony.] 



The variation — from month to month — of the proportion 
of deaths to the whole number living is singular and interesting. 
It supports the theory I have advanced above, as the following 
facts, taken from the official report, will show ; 

In April one in every sixteen died. 

In May one in every twenty-six died. 

In June one in every twenty -two died. 



A 8T0KY OF EEBEL MILITARY PEISONS. 



321 



In July one in every eighteen died. 

In August one in every eleven died. 

In September one in every three died. 

In October one in every two died. 

In November one in every three died. 

Does the reader fully understand that in September one- 
third of those in the pen died, that in October one-half of the 
remainder perished, and in November one-third of those who 
still sur\ived, died? Let him pause for a moment and read 
this over carefully again, because its startling magnitude will 
hardly dawn upon him at first reading. It is true that the 
fearfully disproportionate mortality of those months was largely 
due to the fact that it was mostly the sick that remained behind, 
but even this diminishes but little the frightf ulness of the show- 
ing. Did any one ever hear of an epidemic so fatal that one- 
third of those attacked by it in one month died ; one-half of the 
remnant the next month, and one-third of the feeble remainder 
the next month ? If he did, his reading has been much more 
extensive than mine. 

The number of prisoners in the Stockade, the number of 
deaths each month, and the daily average is given as follows : 



Months. 


Number in 
fetockade. 


Deaths. 


Daily 
Average. 




4,703 
9.577 
1S,454 
ati.::i(;7 
31,(i78 
3],(i!J3 
8.21S 
4,208 
1,^59 


2S3 

m-i 

711 
1,202 
1,712 
:-;,(i76 
2,7!(0 
1,5SI5 

485 


9 




19 


UHy --- 


23 




40 


July 


56 




99 




90 




51 




10 







The greatest number of deaths m one day is reported to have 
occurred on the 23d of August, when one hundred and twenty- 
seven died, or one man every eleven minutes. 

The greatest number of prisoners in the Stockade is stated to 
have been August 8, when there were thirty-three thousand 
one hundred and fourteen. 

I have always imagined both these statements to be short of 
the truth, because my remembrance is that one day in August 
21 



322 iLNDERSOHVLLLE. 

I counted over two hundred dead lying in a row. As for the 
greatest number of prisoners, I remember quite distinctly 
standing by the ration wagon during the whole time of the 
delivery of rations, to see how many prisoners there really were 
inside. That day the One Hundred and Thirty-Third Detach- 
ment was called, and its Sergeant came up and drew rations 
fcr a full detachment. All the other detachments were habi- 
tually kept full by replacing those who died with new comers. 
As each detachment consisted of two hundred and seventy 
men, one hundred and thirty-three detachments would make 
thirty-five thousand nine hundred and ten, exclusive of those 
in the hospital, and those detailed outside as cooks, clerks, 
hospital attendants and various other employments — say from 
one to two thousand more. 



CHAPTER XLin. 

DIFFICtTLTT OF EXERCISING EMBABKASSMENT8 OF A MORNINO WALB 

THE EIALTO OF THE PRISON CUESINQ THE SOUTHERN CONFED- 
ERACY THE STORY OF THE BATfLE OF SPOTTSYLVANIA COURl 

HOUSE. 

Certainly in no other great community that ever existed upon 
the face of the globe was there so little daily ebb and flow as 
in this. Dull as an ordinary Town or City may be ; however 
monotonous, eventless, even stupid the lives of its citizens, there 
is yet, nevertheless, a flow every day of its life-blood — its pop- 
ulation — towards its heart, and an ebb of the same, every even- 
ing towards its extremities. These recurring tides mingle all 
classes together and promote the general healthfulness, as the 
constant motion hither and yon of the ocean's waters purify 
and sweeten them. 

The lack of these helped vastly to make the living mass 
inside the Stockade a human Dead Sea — or rather a Dying 
Sea — a putrefying, stLnldng lake, resolving itself into phos- 
phorescent corruption, like those rotting southern seas, whose 
seething filth burns in hideous reds, and ghastly greens and 
yellows. 

Being little call for motion of any kind, and no room to 
exercise whatever wish there might be in that direction, very 
many succumbed unresistingly to the apathy which was so 
strongly favored by despondency and the weakness induced by 
continual hunger, and lying supinely on the hot saml, day in 
and day out, speedily brought themselves into such a condition 
as invited the attacks of disease. 

It required both determination and effort to take a little 



324 AJfDERSONTILLE. 

walking exercise. The ground was so denseh'' crowded with 
holes and other devices for shelter that it took one at least ten 
minutes to pick his way through the narrow and tortuous 
labyrinth which served as paths for communication between 
different parts of the Camp, Still further, there was nothing 
to see anywhere or to form sufficient inducement for any one 
to make so laborious a journey. One simply encountered at 
every new step the same unwelcome sights that he had just 
left ; there was a monotony in the misery as in everything else, 
and consequently the temptation to sit or lie still in one's own 
quarters became very great. 

I used to make it a point to go to some of the remoter parts 
of the Stockade once every day, simply for exercise. One can 
gain some idea of the crowd, and the difficulty of making one's 
way through it, when I say that no point in the prison could 
be more than fifteen hundred feet from where I staid, and, 
had the way been clear, I could have walked thither and back 
in at most a half an hour, yet it usually took me from two to 
threer hours to make one of these journeys. 

This daily trip, a few visits to the Creek to wash all ove-r, a 
few games of chess, attendance upon roll call, drawing rations, 
cooking and eating the same, " lousing " . my fragments of 
clothes, and doing some little duties for my sick and helpless 
comrades, constituted the daily routine for myself, as for most 
of the active youths in the prison. 

The Creek was the great meeting point for all inside the 
Stockade. All able to walk were certain to be there at least 
once during the da}", and we made it a rendezvous, a place to 
exchange gossip, discuss the latest news, canvass the prospects 
of exchange, and, most of all, to curse the Rebels. Indeed no 
conversation ever progressed very far without both speaker and 
listener taking frequent rests to say bitter things as to the 
Eebels generally, and TVirz, AVinder and Davis in particular. 

A conversation between two boys — strangers to each other — 
who came to the Creek to wash themselves or their clothes, or 
for some other purpose, would progress thus : 

First Boy — "I belong to the Second Corps, — Hancock's? 
[the Army of the Potomac boys always mentioned what Corps 
they belonged to, where the "Western boys stated their Reg- 



A STOKY OF REBEL MILITAST PKI80N8. 



325 



Iment.'] They got me at Spottsylvania, when they were butting 
their heads against our breast- works, trying to get even with us 
for gobbling up Johnson in the morning," — He stops suddenly 
and changes tone to say : " I hope to God, that when our folks 
get Eichmond, they will put old Ben Butler in command of it, 

with orders to hmb, 
skin and jayhawk it 
worse than he did 
New Orleans." 

Second Boy, (fer- 
vently :) " I wish to 
God he would, and 
that he'd catch old 
Jeff., and that gray- 
headed devil. Win- 
der, and the old 
Dutch Captain, strip 
'em just as we were, 
put 'em in this pen, 
with just the rations 
they are givin' us, 
and set a guard of 
plantation niggers 
over 'em, with orders 

DENOUNCING THE sou III KiiN CONFEDEKACT. ^ ,1 ,, • , , 

to blow their whole 
infernal heads off, if they dared so much as to look at the dead 
line." 

First Boy — (returning to the story of his capture.) "Old 
Hancock caught the .Johnnies that morning the neatest you 
ever saw anything in your life. After the two armies had 
murdered each other for four or five days in the Wilderness, by 
fighting so close together that much of the time you could 
almost shake hands with the Graybacks, both hauled olf a 
little, and lay and glowered at each other. Each side had lost 
about twenty thousand men in learning that if it attacked the 
other it would get mashed fine. So each built a line of works 
and lay behind them, and tried to nag the other into coming 
out and attacking. At Spottsylvania our lines and those of the 
Johnnies weren't twelve hundred yards apart. The ground 




326 iJTOEBSONVILLE. 

was clear and clean between them, and any force that 
attempted to cross it to attack would be cut to pieces, as sure 
as anything. "We laid there three or four days watching each 
other — just like boys at school, who shake fists and 'dare' 
each other. At one place the Rebel line ran out towards us 
like the top of a great letter 'A.' The night of the 11th of May 
it ruined very hard, and then came a fog so thick that yon 
couldn't see the length of a company. Hancock thought he'd 
take advantage of this. We were all turned out very quietly 
about four o'clock in the morning. Not a hit of noise was 
allowed. We even had to take off our canteens and tin cups, 
that they might not rattle against our bayonets. The ground 
was so wet that our footsteps couldn't be heard. It wius one of 
those deathly still movements, when you think your heart is 
making as much noise as a bass drum. 

" The Johnnies didn't seem to have the faintest suspicion of 
what was coming, though they ought, because we would have 
expected such an attack from them if we hadn't made it our- 
selves. Their pickets were out just a little ways from their 
works, and we were almost on to them before they discovered 
us. They fired and ran back. At this we raised a yell and 
dashed forward at a charge. As we poured over the works, the 
Eebels came double-quicking up to defend them. We flanked 
Johnson's Division quicker'n you could say ' Jack Hobinson,' and 
had four thousand of 'em in our grip just as nice as you please. 
We sent them to the rear under guard, and started for the next 
line of Hebel works about a half a mile away. But we had 
now waked up the whole of Lee's army, and they all came 
straight for us, like packs of mad wolves. Ewell struck us in 
the center ; Longstreet let drive at our left flank, and IliU 
tackled our right. We fell back to the works we had taken, 
Warren and Wright came up to help us, and we had it liot and 
heavy for the rest of the day and part of the night. The John- 
nies seemed so mad over what we'd done that they were lialf 
crazy. They charged us five times, coming up exery time just 
as if they were going to lift us right out of the works with the 
bayonet. About midnight, after they'd lost over ten thousand 
men, they seemed to understand that we had pre-em])ted that 
piece of real estate, and didn't propose to allow anybody to 



A 8T0KT OF REBEL MILITASY PRISONS. 327 

Jmnp our claim, so they fell back sullen like to their main 
works. When they came on the last charf^e, our Brigadier 
walked behind each of our regiments and said : 

" • Boys, we'll send 'em back this time for keeps. Give it to 
'em by the acre, and when they begin to waver, we'll all jump 
over the works and go for them with the bayonet.' 

"AYe did it just that way. We poured such a fire on them 
that the bullets knocked up the ground in front just lilve you 
have seen the deep dust in a road in the middle of Summer fly 
up when the first great big drops of a rain storm strike it. 
But they came on, yelling and swearing, officers in front wav- 
ing swords, and shouting — all that business, you know. AYhen 
they got to about one hundred yards from us, they did not seem 
to be coming so fast, and there was a good deal of confusion 
among them. The brigade bugle sounded 

" ' Stop firing.' 

" We all ceased instantly. The Eebels looked up in astonish- 
ment. Our General sang out 

" 'Fix bayonets ! ' 
but we knew what was coming, and were already executing the 
order. You can imagine the crash that ran down the fine, as 
every fellow snatched his bayonet out and slapped it on the 
muzzle of his gun. Then the General's voice rang out like a 
bugle : 

" ' Ready ! — forward ! charge ! ' 

"We cheered till everything seemed to split, and jumped 
over the works, almost every man at the same minute. The 
Johnnies seemed to have been puzzled at the sto]:>])age of our 
fire. AYhen we all came sailing over the works, with guns 
brought right down where tliey meant business, tliey were so 
astonished for a minute that they stood stock still, not knowing 
whether to come for us, or run. We did not allow them long 
t-o debate, but went right towards them on the double quick, 
with the baN^onets looking awful savage and hungry. . It was 
too much for Mr. Johnny Reb's nerves. They all seemed to 
'about face' at once, and they lit out of there as if they had 
been sent for in a hurry. We chased after 'em as fast as we 
could, and picked up just lots of 'em. FinaUy it began to be 
raaJ funny, j^ Johnny's wind would begin to give out he'd 



328 



ANDERSON VILLB. 



fall behind his comrades ; he'd hear us yell and think that "WO 
were right behind him, ready to sink a bayonet through him ; 
he'd turn around, throw up his hands, and sing out : 

"'I surrender, mister I I surrender I' and hnd that we were 




THE CnARQfi. 

a hundred feet off, and would have to have a bayonet as long 
as one of McClellan's general orders to touch him. 

" "Well, my company was the left of our regiment, and our 
regiment was the left of the brigade, and we swung out ahead 
of all the rest of the boys. In our excitement of chasing the 
Johnnies, we didn't see that we had passed an angle of their 
works. About thirty of us had become separated from the 
company and were chasing a squad of about seventy-five or one 
hundred. We had got up so close to them that we hollered : 

" ' Halt there, now, or we'U blow your heads off.' 



A S1\U;V OK KKl'.KL Mli.IlAJiY f'liltsONb. 329 



"They turned round with ' Ualt yourselves; you 
Yankee 



" We looked around at this, and saw that we were not one 
hundred feet away from the angle of the works, which v, ere 
filled with Rebels waiting for our fellows to get to where they 
could have a good flank lire upon them. There was nothing 
to do but to throw down oar guns aad surrender, and we had 
hardly gone inside of the works, until the Johnnies opened on 
our brigade and drove it back. This ended the battle at Spott- 
sjdvania Court House." 

Second Boy (irrelevantly.) " Some day the underpinning will 

fly out from under the South, and let it sink right into 

the middle kittle o' hell." 

First Boy (savagely.) " I only wish the whole Southern Con- 
federacy was hanging over hell by a smgle string, and I had a 
knife." 



CHAPTER XLIV. 

REBEL MT78IO SINGULAR LACK OF THE CREATIVE POWEB AMONG 

THE SOUTHERNERS CONTRAST WITH SIMILAR PEOPLE EL8B- 

WHERE THEIR FAVORITE MUSIC, AND WHERE IT WAS BORROWED 

FROM A riFER WITH ONE TUNE. 

I have before meutioned as among the things that grew upon 
one with increasing acquaintance with the Rebels on their 
native heath, Tvas astonishment at their lack of mechanical skill, 
and at their inability to graj^ple with numbers and the simpler 
processes of arithmetic. Another characteristic of the same 
nature was their wonderful lack of musical ability, or of any 
kind of tuneful creativeness. 

Elsewhere, all over the world, people living under similar 
conditions to the Southerners are exceedingly musical, and we 
owe the greiit majority of the sweetest compositions which 
delight the ear and subdue the senses to unlettered song-makers 
of the Swiss mountains, the Tyrol ese valleys, the BavanaB 
Highlands, and the minstrels of Scotland, Ireland and Wales. 

The music of English-speaking people is very largely mad« 
up of these contributions from tlie folk-songs of dwellers in the 
wUder and more mountainous parts of the British Isles. One 
rarely goes far out of the way in attributing to this source any 
air that he may hear tliat captivates him with its seductive opu- 
lence of harmony. Exquisite melodies, limpid and mistrained 
as the carol of a bird in Spring-time, and as plaintive as the coo- 
ing of a turtle-dove seems as natural products of the Scottish 
Highlands as the gorse which blazons on their hillsides in 
August. Debarred from expressing their aspirations as people 



A 8T0BY OF KEBKL MILrrAET PEIS0N3. 831 

of broader culture do — in painting, in sculpture, in poetry and 
prose, these mountaineers make song the flexible and ready 
instrument for the communication of every emotion that sweeps 
across their souls. 

Love, hatred, grief, revenge, anger, and especially war seems 
to tune their minds to harmony, and awake the voice of song 
in thei? hearts. The battles which the Scotch and Irish fought 
to replace the luckless Stuarts upon the British throne — the 
bloody rebellions of 1715 and 1745, left a rich legacy of sweet 
song, the outpouring of loving, passionate loyalty to a wretched 
cause ; sougs which are to-day esteemed and sung wherever the 
English language is spoken, by people who have long since for- 
gotten what burning feelings gave birtli to their favorite mel- 
odies. 

For a centur}'- the bones of both the Pretenders have mol- 
dered in alien soil ; the names of James Edward, and Charles 
Edward, which were once trumpet blasts to rouse armed men, 
mean as little to the multitude of to-day as those of the Saxon 
Ethelbert, and Danish Ilardicanute, yet the world goes on sing- 
ing — and will probably as long as the Englisli language is spo- 
ken — "Wha'll be King but Charlie?" "When Jamie Comes 
Hame," "Over the Water to Charlie," "Charlie is my Dar- 
ling," " The Bonny Blue Bonnets are Over the Border," "Sad- 
dle Your Steeds and Awa," and a myriad others whose infinite 
tenderness and melody no modern composer can equal. 

Yet these same Scotch and Irish, the same Jacobite English, 
transplanted on account of their chronic rebelliousness to the 
mountains of Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia, seem to have 
lost their tunefulness, as some fine singing birds do when car- 
ried from their native shores. The descendants of those who 
drew swords for James and Charles a,t Preston Pans and CuUo- 
den dwell to-day in the dales and valleys of the Alleganies, as 
their fa,thers did in the dales and valleys of the Grampians, but 
their voices are mute. 

As a rule the Southerners are fond of music. They are fond 
of sino-ing and listening to old-fashioned ballads, most of which 
have never been printed, but handed down from one generation 
to the other, like the Volhlieder of Germany. They sing these 
with the wild, fervid impressiveness characteristic of the ballad 



332 ' AUDEKSONVILLK. 

singing of unlettered people. Very many play tolerably on the 
violin and banjo, and occasionally one is found whose instru- 
mentation may be called good. But above this hight they 
never soar. The only musician produced by the South of whom 
the rest of the country has ever heard, is Blind Tom, the negro 
idiot. No composer, no song writer of any kind has appeared 
within the borders of Dixie. 

It was a disappointment to me that even the stress of the 
war, the passion and fierceness with which the Rebels felt and 
fought, could not stimulate any adherent of the Stars and Bars 
into the production of a single lyric worthy in tlie remotest 
degree of the magnitude of the struggle, and the depth of the 
popular feeling. Where two million Scotch, fighting to restore 
the fallen fortunes of the worse than worthless Stuarts, filled 
the world with immortal music, eleven million of Southerners, 
fighting for what they claimed to be individual freedom and 
national life, did not produce any original verse, or a bar of 
music that the world could recognize as such. This is the fact ; 
and an undeniable one. Its explanation I must leave to abler 
analysts than I am. 

Searching for peculiar causes we find but two that make the 
South differ from the ancestral home of these people. These 
two were Climate and Slavery. Chmatic effects will not 
account for the phenomenon, because we see that the peasantry 
of the mountains of Spain and the South of France — as 
ignorant as these people, and dwellers in a still more enervating 
atmosphere — are very fertile in musical composition, and their 
songs are to the Romanic languages what the Scotch and Irish 
ballads are to the Enghsh. 

Then it must be ascribed to the incubus oi Slavery upon the 
intellect, which has repressed this as it has all other healthy 
growths in the South. Slavery seems to benumb all the 
faculties except the passions. The fact that the mountaineers 
had but few or no slaves, does not seem to be of importance in 
the case. They lived under the deadly shadow of the upas 
tree, and suffered the consequences of its stunting their devel- 
opment in all directions, as the ague-smitten inhabitant of the 
Roman Campana finds every sense and every muscle clogged 
by the filtering in of the insidious miasma. They did not 



A 8T0KY OF REBEL MILITAET TEISONS. 333 

compose songs and music, because they did not have the intel- 
lectual energy for that work. 

The negros displayed all the musical creativeness of that sec- 
tion. Their wonderful prolificness in wild, rude songs, with 
strangely melodious airs that burned themselves into the mem- 
ory, was one of the salient characteristics of that down-trodden 
race. Like the Russian serfs, and the bondmen of all ages and 
lands, the songs they made and sang all had an undertone of 
touching plaintiveness, born of ages of dumb suffering. The 
themes were exceedingly simple, and the range of subjects lim- 
ited. The joys, and sorrows, hopes and despairs of love's grat" 
ification or disappointment, of struggles for freedom, coutegte 
with malign persons and influences, of rage, hatred, jealoi 
revenge, such as form the motifs for the majority of the poetry 
of free and strong races, were wholly absent from their lyrics. 
Rehgion, hunger and toil were their main inspiration. They 
sang of the pleasures of idling in the gonial sunshine; the 
delights of abundance of food ; the eternal happiness that 
awaited them in the heavenly future, where the slave-driver 
ceased from troubling and the weary were at rest ; where Time 
rolled around in endless cycles of days spent in basking, harp 
in hand, and silken clad, in golden streets, under the soft 
effulgence of cloudless skies, glowing with warmth and kind- 
ness emanating from the Creator himself. Had their masters 
condescended to borrow the music of the slaves, they would 
have found none whose sentiments were suitable for the odes 
of a people undergoing the pangs of what was hoped to be the 
birth of a new nation. 

The three songs most popular at the South, and generally 
regarded as distinctively Southern, were "The Bonnie Blue 
Flag," " Mar^dand, My Maryland," and " Stonewall Jackson 
Crossing into Maryland." The first of these was the greatest 
favorite bv long odds. Women sang, men whistled, and 
the so-called musicians played it wherever we went. While in 
the field before capture, it was the commonest of experiences to 
have Rebel women sing it at us tauntingly from the houses 
that we passed or near which we stopped. If ever near enough 
a Rebel camp, we were sure to hear its wailing crescendos 
rising upon, the air from the lips or instruments of some one or 



334 



AJSDEK80NV1LLE. 



more quartered there. At Eichmond it rang upon us con- 
stantly from some som'ce or another, and the same was true 
wherever else we went m. the so-called Confederacy. I give 
the air and words below : 



« THE BOKNIE BLUE FLAG." 



m 






1^ 



0—\-^ 



-^- 



-tf— |-' 



:^: 



We are a band of brothers, And na - tive to the noli 
-f; -o c — -g a 



P 



->- 



-^^- 



:ei- 



Slv*=^v3 



Figlit-ing for our Lib - er - ty, With treasure, blood, and toil ; And 

-N 1 -N- 



W 






when our rights were tlireatened, The cry rose near and far, Ilur- 



w 



-y- 



rail for the Bon-nie Blue FLag, that bears a Sin - gle Star! 
€ii©s?rs. 

r-e- ^-rJ^J ^-rJ^J ^-T-J ^ ^ K-r^^^. S- 

if — I -W \ \~* 1 ^ 



r-l— r-fc^ 



^ ' 



■-#- 



Hiir - rah! Hur- rah! for South - crn Rights, Hur - ral 



Hur- 



[!?— «r-^ 






-^- 



-^ 



" ■&■.-«■ 

rah! for tlie Bonnie Blue Flag, that bears a Sin - gle Star! 

All familiar with Scotch songs will readily recognize the 
name and air as an old friend, and one of the fierce Jacobite 
melodies that for a long time disturbed the tranquility of the 
Brunswicli family on the Enghsh throne. The new words su])- 
plied [by the Rebels are the merest doggerel, and fit the 
music as poorly as the unchanged name of the song fitted to its. 
new use. The flag of the EebeUion was not a bonnie blue one ; 



A STOET OF REBEL MILITAKT PRISONS. ^ 335 

bub liad quite as much, red and white as azm^e. It did not have 

a single star, but thirteen. 

Next in popularity was "Maryland, My Maryland." The 
versification of this was of a much higher order, being fairly 
respectable. The air is old, and a familiar one to all college 
students, and belongs to one of the most common of German 
household songs : 

O, Tattnenbaum I O, Tannenbaam, -wie tru sind deine Blsetterl 
Du gruenst nicht nar zur Soinm<if zeit, 
Nein, aucli ia Winter, when es Schiieit, etc. 

which Longfellow has finely translated, 

O, hemlock treet O, hemlock tree! how faithful are thy branches! 

Green not alone in Summer time, 

But in the Winter's fiost and rime. 
O, hemlock treel O, hemlock tree! how faithful are thy branches. «tc 

The Eebel version ran : 

MAKYLAND. 

The despot's heel is on thy ehoro, 

Maryland I 
His touch is at thy temple door, 

Marj'land I 
Avenge the patriotic gore 
That flecked the streets of Baltimora, 
And be the battle qneen of yore, 
Maryland! MyMarylandl 

Hark to the wand'ring son's appeal, 

Marjiand 1 
My mother State, to thee I kneel, 

Slaryland! 
For life and death, for woe and weal, 
Thy peerless chivalry reveal, 
And gird thy beauteous limbs with staal, 
Maryland I My Maryland 1 

Thou wilt not cower in the dust, 

Maryland! 
Thy beaming sword shall never ^a3t^ 

Maryland! 
Remember Carroll's sacred trust. 
Remember Howard's warlike thxuBt— 
And all thy siumberers with the just, 
Maryland! My Maryland! 

Come! 'tis the red dawn of the day, 

Maryland 1 
Comel with thy panopHed array, 

jiiaTyland! 
■With Ringgold's spirit for the fray. 
With Watson's blood at Monterey, 
With fearless Lowe and dashing May, 
Maryland! My Marylard! 



336 AJfDEKSONVILLE. 

Cornel for thy shield is bright and strong, 

Maryland! 
Come! for thy dalliance does thee wrong, 

Maryland! 
Come ! to thine owm heroic throng, 
That etalks with Liberty along, 
And give a new Key to thy Boug, 
Maryland! My Maryland! 

Dear Mother! burst the tyrant's chain, 

Maryland! 
Virginia should not call in vain, 

Maryland! 
She meets her sisters on the plain — 
"Sic semper,'^ 'tis the proud refrain. 
That baffles millions back amain, 

Maryland! 
Arise, in majesty again, 
Maryland ! My Maryland ! 

I see the blush upon thy cheek, 

Man'land! 
But thou wast ever bravely meek, 

Maryland! 
But lo ! there surges forth a shriek 
From hill to hill, from creek to creek — • 
Potomac calls to Chesapeake, 
Maryland! My Maryland! 

Thou wilt not yield the Vandal toll. 

Maryland! 
Thou wilt not crook to hia control, 

Maryland! 
Better the fire upon thee roll. 
Better the blade, the shot, the bowl. 
Than crucifixion of the soul, 
Maryland! My Maryland! 

I hear the distant Thunder hmn, 

Maryland ! 
The Old Line's bugle, fife, and dmm, 

Maryland ! 
She is not dead, nor deaf, nor dumb — 
Huzza! she spurns the Northern scum I 
She breathes — she burns! she'll comel Bhe'D comet 
Maryland! My Maryland! 

"Stonewall Jackson Crossing into Maryland," "was'another 
travesty, of about the same literary merit, or rather demerit, as 
" The Bonnie Blue Flag." Its air was that of the well-known 
and popular negro minstrel song, " Billy Patterson." For all 
that, it sounded very martial and stirring when played by a 
brass band. 

"We heard these songs with tiresome iteration, daily and 
nio-htly, during our stay in the Southern Confederacy. Some 



▲ BTOBY OF REBEL MILITABT PRISONS. 837 

one of the guards seemed to be perpetually beguiling the wear. 
iness of his watch by singing in all keys, in every sort of a 
voice, and with the wildest latitude as to air and time. They 
became so terribly irritating to us, that to this day the remem- 
brance of those soul-lacerating lyrics abides with me as one of 
the chief of the minor torments of our situation. They were, in 
fact, nearly as bad as the lice. 

"We revenged ourselves as best we could by constructing 
fearfully wicked, obscene and insulting parodies on these, and 
by singing them with irritating effusiveness in the hearing of 
the guards who were inflicting these nuisances upon us. 

Of the same nature was the garrison music. One fife, played 
by an asthmatic old fellow whose breathings were nearly as 
audible as his notes, and one rheumatic drummer, constituted 
the entire band for the post. The fifer actually knew but one 
tune — "The Bonnie Blue Flag" — and did not know that well. 
But it was all that he had, and he played it with wearisome 
monotony for every camp call — five or six times a day, and 
seven days in the week. He called us up in the morning with 
it for a reveille; he sounded the "roll call" and "drill call,'' 
breakfast, dinner and supper with it, and finally sent us to bed, 
with the same dreary wail that had rung in our ears all day. 
I never hated any piece of music as I came to hate that thren- 
ody of treason. It would have been such a relief if the old 
asthmatic who played it could have been induced to learn another 
tune to play on Sundays, and give us one day of rest. He did 
not, but desecrated the Lord's Day by playing as vilely as on 
the rest of the week. The Rebels were fully conscious of their 
musical deficiencies, and made repeated but unsuccessful 
attempts to induce the musicians among the prisoners to come 
outside and form a band, 
22 



CHAPTER XLV. 



AUOU8T NEEDLES STTJCK IN PUMPKIN SEEDS SOME PHENOMENA 

OF STARVATION RIOTING IN REMEMBERED LUXURIES. 

"mincy," said tall, gaunt Jack North, of the One Hun- 
dred and Fourteenth Illinois, to me, one day, as we sat contem- 
plating our naked, and sadly attenuated underpinning ; " what 
do our legs and feet most look like ? " 
" Give it up, Jack," said I. 

" Why — darning needles stuck in pumpkin seeds, of course." 

I never heard a better comparison for our wasted limbs. 

The effects of the great bodily emaciation were sometimes 

very startling. Boys of a fleshy habit 

would change so in a few weeks as to lose 

all resemblance to their former selves, and 

comrades who came into prison later 

would utterly fail to recognize them. 

Most fat men, as most large men, died 

in a little while after entering, though 

there were exceptions. One of these 

was a boy of my own company, named 

George Hillicks. George had shot up 

within a few years to over six feet in 

hight, and then, as such boys occasionally 

do, had, after enlisting with us, taken on 

such a development of flesh that we nick- 

^;^ named him the " Giant," and he became a 

^ ^ ,W pretty good load for even the strongest 

"TLAGSTlrpr^ horse. George held his flesh through 

Belle Isle, and the earlier weeks in AndersonviUe, but June, 

July, and August " fetched him," as the boys said. He 




£?> 



8T0ET OF REBEL MILITAilT PEIS0N8. 



339 



seemed to melt away like an icicle on a Spring day, and he 
grew so thin that his hight seemed preternatural. We called 
him " Flagstaff," and cracked all sorts of jokes about putting 
an insulator on his head, and setting him up for a telegraph 
pole, braiding his legs and using him for a whip lash, letting 
his hair grow a Uttle longer, and trading him off to the Rebels 
for a sponge and staff for the artillery, etc. We all expected 
him to die, and looked continually for the development of the 
fatal scurvy symptoms, which were to seal his doom. But ho 
worried through, and came out at last in good shape, a happy 
result due as much as to anything else to his having in Chester 
Hayward, of Prairie City, 111., — one of the most devoted 
chums I ever knew. Chester nursed and looked out for George 




NUESmO A SICK OOiTRADE. 



with wife like fidelity, and had his reward in bringing him safe 
through our lines. There were thousands of instances of this 
generous devotion to each other by chums in Andersonville, 
and I know of nothing that reflects any more credit upon our 
boy soldiers. 

There was little chance for any one to accumulate flesh on 
the rations we were receiving. I say it in all soberness that I 
do not believe that a healthy hen could have grown fat 



840 ANDEKSONVILLB. 

upon tliem. I am sure that any good-sized " shanghai " eats 
more every day than the meager half loaf that we had to 
maintain life upon. Scanty as this was, and hungry as aU 
were, very many could not eat it. Their stomachs revolted 
against the trash; it became so nauseous to them that they 
could not force it down, even when famishing, and they 
died of starvation with the chunks of the so-called bread 
under their head. I found myself rapidly approaching this con- 
dition. I had been blessed with a good digestion and a talent 
for sleeping under the most discouraging circumstances. These, 
I have no doubt, were of the greatest assistance to me in my 
struggle for existence. But now the rations became fearfully 
obnoxious to me, and it was only with the greatest effort — 
pulling the bread into little pieces and swallowing each of these 
as one would a pill — that I succeeded in worrying the stuS. 
down. I had not as yet fallen away very much, but as I had 
never, up to that time, weighed so much as one hundred and 
twenty-five pounds, there was no great amount of adipose to 
lose. It was evident that unless some change occurred my time 
was near at hand. 

There was not only hunger for more food, but longing with 
an intensity beyond expression for alteration of some kind in 
the rations. The changeless monotony of the miserable saltless 
bread, or worse mush, for days, weeks and months, became 
unbearable. If those wretched mule teams had only once a 
month hauled in something different — if they had come in 
loaded with sweet potatos, green corn or wheat flour, there 
would be thousands of men still hving who now slumber 
beneath those melancholy pines. It would have given some- 
thing to look forward to, and remember when past. But to 
know each day that the gates would open to admit the same 
distasteful apologies for food took away the appetite and raised 
one's gorge, even while famishing for something to eat. 

We could for a while forget the stench, the lice, the heat, the 
maggots, the dead and dying around us, the insulting malig- 
nance of our jailors; but it was very hard work to banish 
thoughts and longings for food from our minds. Hundreds 
became actually insane from brooding over it. Crazy men 
could be found in all parts of the camp. Numbers of them 



▲ 8T0EY OF KEBEL MTLITABY PRISONS. 341 

wandered around entirely naked. Their babblings and maun- 
derings about something to eat were painful to hear. I have 
before mentioned the case of the Plymouth Pilgrim near me, 
whose insanity took the form of imagining that he was sitting 
at the table with his family, and who would go through the 
show of helping them to imaginary viands and delicacies. The 
cravings for green food of those afflicted with the scurvy were 
agonizing. Large numbers of watermelons were brought to 
the prison, and sold to those who had the money to pay for 
them at from one to five dollars, greenbacks, apiece. A boy 
who had means to buy a piece of these would be followed 
about while eating it by a crowd of perhaps twenty-five or 
thirty livid-gummed scorbutics, each imploring him for the 
rind when he was through with it. 

We thought of food all day, and were visited with torturing 
dreams of it at night. One of the pleasant recollections of my 
pre-military life was a banquet at the " Planter's House," St. 
Louis, at which I was a boyish guest. It was, doubtless, an 
ordinary affair, as banquets go, but to me then, with all the 
keen appreciation of youth and first experience, it was a feast 
worthy of Lucullus. But now this delightful reminiscence 
became a torment. Hundreds of times I dreamed I was again 
at the " Planter's." I saw the wide corridors, with their mosaic 
pavement; I entered the grand dining-room, keeping timidly 
near the friend to whose kindness I owed this wonderful favor ; 
I saw again the mirror-lined walls, the evergreen decked ceil- 
ings, the festoons and mottos, the tables gleaming with cut- 
glass and silver, the buffets with wines and fruits, the brigade 
of sleek, black, white-aproned waiters, headed by one who had 
presence enough for a Major General. Again I reveled in all 
the dainties and dishes on the bill-of-fare ; calling for every- 
thing that I dared to, just to see what each was like, and to be 
able to say afterwards that I had partaken of it; all these 
bewildering delights of the first realization of what a boy has 
read and wondered much over, and longed for, would dance 
their rout and reel through my somnolent brain. Then I would 
awake to find myself a half-naked, half -starved, vermin-eaten 
wretch, crouching in a hole in the ground, waiting for my 
keepers to fling me a chunk of corn bread. 



842 Ain)EE80NVILLK. 

Naturally the boys — and especially the country boys and 
new prisoners — tallied much of victuals — what they had had, 
and what they would have again, when they got out. Take 
this as a sample of the conversation which miglit be heard in 
any group of boys, sitting together on the sand, killing lice and 
talking of exchange : 

Tc/tn — "Well, Bill, when we get back to God's country, you 
and Jim and John must all come to m}'' house and take dinner 
with me. I want to give you a square meal. I want to show 
you just Avhat good livin' is. You know my mother is just the 
best cook in all that section. When she lays herself out to get 
up a meal all the other women in the neighborhood just stand 
back and admire " 

Bill—''0, that's all right; but I'll bet she can't hold a 
candle to my mother, when it comes to good cooking." 

Jiin — "No, nor to mine." 

John — (with patronizing contempt.) " O, shucks ! Kone of 
you fellers were ever at our house, even when \xq had one of 
our common week-day dinners." 

Tom — (unheedful of the counter claims.) I licv been 
studyin' up the dinner I'd like, and the bill-of-fai'o l\\ set out 
for you feud's Avhen you come over to see me. First, of course, 
we'll lay the foundation like with a nice, juicy loin ruasi, and 
some mashed potatos. 

BUI — (interrupting.) "Now, do 3"0U like mashed j)otatos 
with beef? The way Twy mother does is to pare the ])otatos, 
and lay them in the pan along with the beef. Then, 3'ou k'uow, 
they come oui just as nice and crisp, and Irown 1 they have 
soaked up all the beef gravy, and they crinkle between your 
teeth — " 

Jim — "Now, I teU you, mashed Neshannocks with butter 
on 'em is plenty good enough for m<?." 

John — "If you'd et some of the new kind of peachblows 
that we raised in the old pasture lot the year before I enlisted, 
you'd never say another word about your Neshannocks." 

Tom — (taking breath and starting in fresh.) "Thenwe'U 
hev some fried Spring cliickens, of our dominick breed. Them 
dominicks of ours have the nicest, tenderest meat, better'n 
quail, a durned sight, and the way my mother can fry Spring 
chickens " 



▲ BTOBY OF BEBSX MILITAST PRISONS. £48 

Bill — (aside to Jim.) " Every durned woman in the couh^If 
try thinks she can ' spry ching f rickens ; ' but my mother " 

John — "Tou fellers all know that there's nobody knows 
half as much about chicken doin's as these 'tinerant Methodis' 
preachers. They give 'em chicken wherever they go, and folks 
do say that out in the new settlements they can't get no 
preachin', no gospel, nor nothin', until the chickens become so 
plenty that a preacher is reasonably sure of havin' one for his 
dinner wherever he may go. Now, there's old Peter Cart- 
wright, who has traveled over Illinoy and Indianny since the 
the Year One, and preached more good sermons than any other 
man who ever set on saddle-bags, and has et more chickens 
than there are birds in a big pigeon roost. WeU, he took din- 
ner at our house when he came up to dedicate the big, white 
church at Simpkin's Corners, and when he passed up his plate 
the third time for more chicken, he sez, sez he : 'I 've et at a 
great many hundred tables in the fifty years I have labored in 
the vineyard of the Redeemer, but I must say, Mrs. Kiggins, 
that j'-our way of frying chickens is a leetle the nicest that I 
ever knew. I only wish that the sisters generally would get 
your reseet.' Yes, that's what he said, ' a leetle the nicest.' " 

Tom — " An' then, we'll hev biscuits an' butter. I'U just bet 
five hundred dollars to a cent, and give back the cent if I win, 
that we have the best butter at our house that there is in Cen- 
tral lUinoy. You can't never hev good butter onless you have 
a spring house ; there's no use of taikin' — all the patent churns 
that lazy men ever invented — all the fancy milk pans an' cool- 
ers, can't make up for a spring house. Locations for a spring 
house are scarcer than hen's teeth in Illinoy, but we hev one, 
and there ain't a better one in Orange County, New York- 
Then you'll see some of the biscuits my mother makes." 

Bill — " "Well, now, my mother's a boss biscuit-maker, too." 

Jim — "You kin just gamble that mine is." 

John — "O, that's the way you fellers ought to think an' 
taJk, but my mother " 

Tom — (coming in again with fresh vigor) — " They're just as 
light an' fluffy as a dandelion puff, and they melt in your mouth 
like a ripe Bartlett pear. You just pull 'em open — [Now you 
know that I think there's nothin' that shows a person's raisin' 



344 



AKDEBSONVILLK. 



BO well as to see him eat biscuits an' butter. If he's been 
raised mostly on corn bread, an' common doins,' an' don't know 
much about good things to eat, he'U most likely cut his biscuit 
open with a case knife, an' make it fall as flat as one o' yester- 
day's pancakes. But if he is used to biscuits, has had 'em often 
at his house, he'll just pull 'em open, slow an' easy like, then 
he'U lay a little slice of butter inside, and drop a few drops of 
clear honey on this, an' stick the two halves back together 
again, an' — " 

" O, for God Almighty's sake, stop talking that infernal 
nonsense," roar out a half dozen of the surrounding crowd, 
whose mouths have been watering over this unctuous recital of 
the good things of the table. " You blamed fools, do you want 
to drive yourselves and everybody else crazy with such stuff aa 
that. Dry up and try to think of something else." 




▲ DSEAM. 



CHAPTER XLYI. 

▲ BITRLT BEITON THE BTOLID COURAGE THAT MAKES THE ENGLISH 

FLAG A BANNER OF TRrUMPn — OUR COilPANT BUGLER, niS CHAR- 
ACTERISTICS AND HIS DEATH URGENT DEMAND FOR MECHANICS 

NONE WANT TO GO TREATMENT OF A REBEL SHOEMAKER 

ENLARGEMENT OF THE STOCKADE IT IS BROKEN BY A STOmi 

THK WONDERFUL SPRING. 

Early in August, F. Marriott, our Company Bugler, died. 
Previous to coining to America lie had been for many years an 
English soldier, and I accepted him as a type of that stolid, 
doggedly brave class, which forms the bulk of the English 
armies, and has for centuries carried the British flag Avith 
dauntless courage into every land under the sun. Bough, surly 
and unsocial, he did his duty with the unemotional steadiness 
of a machine. He knew nothing but to obey orders, and 
obeyed them under all circumstances promptly, but with stony 
impassiveness. Was the command to move forward into action, 
he moved forward without a word, and with face as blank as a 
side of sole leather. He went as far as ordered, halted at the 
word, and retired at command as phlegmatically as he advanced. 
H he cared a straw whether he advanced or retreated, if it 
mattered to the extent of a pinch of salt whether we whipped 
the Eebels or they defeated us, he kept that feeling so deeply 
hidden in the recesses of his sturdy bosom that no one ever sus- 
pected it. In the excitement of action the rest of the boys 
ghouted, and swore, and expressed their tense feelings in various 
ways, but Marriott might as well have been a graven image, for 
all the expression that he suffered to escape. Doubtless, if the 



346 



ANDERSONVILLK. 



Captain had ordered him to shoot one of the company through 
the heart, he "would have executed the command according to 
the manual of arms, brought his carbine to a " recover," and at 
the word marched back to his quarters without an inquiry as 

to the cause of the proceedings. 
He made no friends, and tliough 
his surliness repelled us, he made 
few enemies. Indeed, he was 
rather a favorite, since he was 
a genuine character ; his gruff- 
ness had no taint of seLGsli 
greed in it ; he minded his own, 
business strictly, and wanted 
others to do the same. "When 
he first came into the company, 
it is true, he gained the enmity 
of nearly everybody in it, but 
an incident occurred which 
turned the tide in his favor. 
Some annoying little depredar 
tions had been practiced on the 
boys, and it needed but a word 
of suspicion to inflame all their 
minds against the surly Englishman as the unknown perpetra- 
tor. The feehng intensified, until about half of the company 
were in a mood to Idll the Bugler outright. As we were 
returning from stable duty one evening, some little occurrence 
fanned the smoldering anger into a fierce blaze ; a couple of 
the smaller boys began an attack upon him ; others hastened to 
their assistance, and soon half the company were engaged in 
the assault. 

He succeeded in disengaging himself from his assailants, and, 
squaring himself off, said, defiantly : 

" Dom yer cowardly heyes ; jest come hat me one hat a time, 
hand hl'll wollop the 'pie gang uv ye's." 

One of our Sergeants styled himself proudly "a Chicago 
rough," and was as vain of his pugilistic abilities as a small boy 
is of a father who plays in the band. We all hated him cor- 
dially — even more than we did Marriott. He thought this was 




Tint ENOLIPn BrOT-ER. 



▲ BTOBY OF EKBEL MLLITAKY PBIS0N8. 347 

I good time to show off, and forcing his way through the 
jrowd, he said, vauntingly : 

" Just fall back and form a ring, boys, and see me polish off 
;he fooll" 

The ring was formed, with the Bugler and the Sergeant in 
:.he center. Though the latter was the younger and stronger) 
ihe first round showed him that it would have profited him 
nuch more to have let Marriott's challenge pass unheeded. As 
I rule, it is as well to ignore all invitations of this kind from 
Englishmen, and especially from those who, like Marriott, have 
served a term in the army, for they are likely to be so handy 
ivith their fists as to make the consequences of an acceptance 
nore lively than desirable. 

So the Sergeant found. " Marriott," as one of the spectators 
expressed it, " went around him like a cooper around a barrel." 
Se planted his blows just where he Avished, to the intense 
ielight of the boys, who yelled enthusiastically whenever he 
jot in " a hot one," and their delight at seeing the Sergeant 
irubbed so thoroughly and artistically, worked an entire revo- 
ution in his favor. 

Thenceforward we viewed his eccentricities with lenient eyes, 
md became rather proud of his bull-dog stolidity and surliness. 
rhe whole battalion soon came to share this feeling, and every- 
body enjoyed hearing his deep-toned growl, wliich mischievous 
aoys would incite by some petty annoyances deliberately 
iesigned for that pm^pose. I will mention, incidentally, that- 
ifter his encounter with the Sergeant no one ever again volun- 
;eered to " pohsh " him off. 

Andersonville did not improve either his temper or his com- 
nunicativeness. He seemed to want to get as far away from 
:he rest of us as possible, and took up his quarters in a remote 
jorner of the Stockade, among utter strangers. Those of ua 
fvho wandered up in his neighborhood occasionally, to see how 
16 was getting along, were received with such scant courtesy, 
uhat we did not hasten to repeat the visit. At length, after 
lone of us had seen him for weeks, we thought that comrade- 
jhip demanded another visit. We found him in the last stages 
3f scurvy and diarrhea. Chunks of uneaten corn bread lay by 
bis head. They were at least a week old. The rations since 



848 AITOEESONVILLE. 

then had evidently been stolen from the helpless man by those 
aromid him. The place where he lay was indescribably filthy, 
and his body was swarming with vermin. Some good Samari- 
tan had filled his httle black oyster can with water, and placed 
it within his reach. For a week, at least, he had not been able 
to rise from the ground ; he could barely reach for the water 
near him. He gave us such a glare of recognition as I remem- 
bered to have seen light up the fast-darkening eyes of a savage 
old mastiff, that I and my boyish companions once found dying 
in the woods of disease and hurts. Had he been able he would 
have driven us away, or at least assailed us with biting Enghsh 
epithets. Thus he had doubtless driven away all those who 
had attempted to help him. We did what little we could, and 
staid with him until the next afternoon, when he died. "We 
prepared his body, in the customary way: folded the hands 
across his breast, tied the toes together, and carried it outside, 
not forgetting each of us, to bring back a load of wood. 
It******* 

The scarcity of mechanics of all kinds in the Confederacy, 
and the urgent needs of the people for many things which the 
war and the blockade prevented their obtaining, led to contin- 
ual inducements being offered to the artizans among us to go 
outside and work at their trade. Shoemakers seemed most in 
demand ; next to these blacksmiths, machinists, molders and 
metal-workers generally. Not a week passed during my 
imprisonment that I did not see a Rebel emissar}'- of some kind 
about the prison seeking to engage skilled workmen for some 
purpose or another. While in Richmond the managers of the 
Tredegar Iron Works were brazen and persistent in their efforts 
to seduce what are termed " malleable iron workers," to enter 
their employ. 

A boy who was master of any one of the commoner trades 
had but to make his wishes known, and he Avould be allowed to 
go out on parole to work. I was a printer, and I think that 
at least a dozen times I was approached by Rebel publishers 
with offers of a parole, and work at good prices. One from 
Columbia, S. C, offered me two dollars and a half a " thousand" 
for composition. As the highest j^rice for such w^ork that I had 
received before enlisting was thirty cents a thousand, this 



A STOEY OF KEBEL MILrrAKY PKIS0N8. 349 

seemed a cliaiace to accumulate untold wealth. Since a man 
working in day time can set from thirty-five to fifty " thou- 
sand " a week, this would make weekly wages run from eighty- 
seven dollars and fifty cents to one hundred and twenty-five 
dollars — but it was in Confederate money, then worth from ten 
to tw^enty cents on the dollar. 

Still better offers were made to iron workers of all kinds, 
to shoemakers, tanners, weavers, tailors, hatters, engineers, 
machinists, millers, railroad men, and similar tradesmen. Any 
of these could have made a handsome thing by accepting the 
offers made them almost weekly. As nearly all in the prison 
had useful trades, it would have been of immense benefit to 
the Confederacy if they could have been induced to work at 
them. There is no measuring the benefit it would have been to 
the Southern cause if all the hundreds of tanners and shoe- 
makers in the Stockade could have been persuaded to go 
outside and labor in providing leather and shoes for the almost 
shoeless people and soldiery. The machinists alone could have 
done more good to the Southern Confederacy than one of our 
brigades was doing harm, by consenting to go to the railroad 
shops at Griswoldville and ply their handicraft. The lack of 
material resources in the South was one of the strongest allies 
our arms had. This lack of resources was primarily caused by 
a lack of skilled labor to develop those resources, and noAvhere 
could there be found a finer collection of skilled laborers tlian 
in the thirty-three thousand prisoners incarcerated in Ander- 
sonville. 

ALL solicitations to accept a parole and go outside to work at 
one's trade were treated with the scorn they deserved. If any 
mechanic yielded to them, the fact did not come under my 
notice. The usual reply to invitations of this kind was : 

"No, sir! By God, I'll stay in here till I rot, and the mag- 
gots carry me out through the cracks in the Stockade, before 
I'll so much as raise my little fiuger to help the infernal Con- 
federacy, or Rebels, in any sliape or form," 

In August a Macon shoemaker came in to get some of his 
trade to go back with him to work in the Confederate shoe fac- 
tory. He prosecuted his search for these until he reached the 
center of the camp on the North Side, when some of the shoe- 



860 ANDEK80NVILLR. 

makers who had gathered around him, apparently considering 

his propositions, seized him and threw him into a well. He 

was kept there a whole day, and only released when Wirz cut 

off the rations of the prison for that day, and announced that no 

more would be issued until the man was returned safe and sound 

to the gate. 

**»♦ «*♦♦ 

The terrible crowding was somewhat ameliorated by the 
opening in July of an addition — six hundred feet long — to the 
North Side of the Stockade. This increased the room inside to 
twenty acres, giving about an acre to every one thousand seven 
hundred men, — a preposterously contracted area still. The 
new ground was not a hot-bed of virulent poison like the old? 
however, and those who moved on to it had that much in their 
favor. 

The palisades between the new and the old portions of the 
pen were left standing when the new portion was opened. We 
were still suffering a great deal of inconvenience from lack of 
wood. That night the standing timbers were attacked by 
thousands of prisoners armed with every species of a tool to cut 
wood, from a case-knife to an ax. They worked the live-long 
night with such energy that by morning not only every inch 
of the logs above ground had disappeared, but that below had 
been dug up, and there was not enough left of the eight hun- 
dred foot wall of twent3^-^ve-foot logs to make a box of 
matches. 

One afternoon — early in August — one of the violent rain 
storms common to that section sprung up, and in a little while 
the water was falling in torrents. The little creek runnmg 
through the camp swelled up immensely, and swept out large 
gaps in the Stockade, both in the west and east sides. The 
Kebels noticed the breaches as soon as the prisoners. Two 
guns were fired from the Star Fort, and all the guards rushed 
out, and formed so as to prevent any egress, if one was 
attempted. Taken by surprise, we were not in a condition to 
profit by the opportunity until it was too late. 

The storm did one good thing : it swept away a great' deal 
of filth, and left the camp much more wholesome. The foul 
stench rising from the camp made an excellent electrical con- 



A flTOET OF EEBEL MILITAIiT PKI80N8. 



351 



ductor, and the lightning struck several times within one hun^ 
dred feet of the prison. 

Toward the end of August there happened what the relig- 




THE BREAK EST THE STOCKADE. 



onsly inclined termed a Providential Dispensation. The water 
in the Creek was indescribably bad. No amount of familiarity 
with it, no increase of intimacy with our offensive surroundings, 
could lessen the disgust at tlie polluted water. As I have said 
previously, before the stream entered the Stoclcade, it was ren- 
dered too filthy for any use by the contaminations from the 
camps of the guards, situated about a half-mile above. Imme- 
diately on entering the Stockade the contamination became 
terrible. The oozy seep at the bottom of the hillsides drained 
directly into it all the mass of filth from a population of thirty- 
three thousand. Imagine the condition of an open sewer, pass- 
ing through the heart of a city of that many people, and 
receiving all the offensive product of so dense a gathering into 
a shallow, sluggish stream, a yard wide and five inches deep. 



352 iJTDEEBOirVTLLE. 

and heated by the burning rajs of the sun in the thirty-second 
degree of latitude. Imagine, if one can, without becoming sick 
at the stomach, all of these people having to wash in and drink 
of this foul flow. 

There is not a scintilla of exaggeration in this statement. 
That it is within the exact truth is demonstrable by the testi- 
mony of any man — Rebel or Union — who ever saw the inside 
of the Stockade at Andersonville. I am quite content to have 
its truth — as well as that of any other statement made in this 
book — be determined by the evidence of any one, no matter 
how bitter his hatred of the Union, who had any personal 
knowledge of the condition of affairs at Andersonville. No 
one can successfully deny that there were at least thirty-three 
thousand prisoners in the Stockade, and that the one shallow, 
narrow creek, which passed through the prison, was at once 
their main sewer and their source of supply of water for bath- 
ing, drinking and washing. With these main facts admitted, 
the reader's common sense of natural consequences will furnish 
the rest of the details. 

It is true that some of the more fortunate of us had wells ; 
thanks to our own energy in overcoming extraordinary obstacles ; 
no thanks to our gaolers for making the slightest effort to pro- 
vide these necessities of life. We dug the wells with case and 
pocket knives, and half canteens to a depth of from twenty to 
thirty feet, pulling up the dirt in pantaloons legs, and running 
continual risk of being smothered to death by the caving in 
of the unwalled sides. Not only did the Rebels refuse to give 
us boards with which to wall the wells, and buckets for drawing 
the water, but they did all in their power to prevent us from 
digging the wells, and made continual forays to capture the 
digging tools, because the wells were frequently used as the 
starting places for tunnels. Professor Jones lays special stress 
on this tunnel feature in his testimony, which I have introduced 
in a previous chapter. 

The great majority of the prisoners who went to the Creek 
for water, went as near as possible to the Dead Line on the 
West Side, where the Creek entered the Stockade, that they 
might get water with as little filth in it as possible. In the 
crowds struggling there for their turn to take a dip, some one 



A BTOKT OF REBEL MILITAilY PRISON^. 



353 



nearly every day got so close to the Dead Line as to arouse a sus- 
picion in the guard's mind that he was touching it. The sus- 
picion was the unfortunate one's death warrant, and also its 
execution. As the sluggish brain of the guard conceived it he 
leveled his gun ; the distance to his victim was not over one hun- 
dred feet ; he never failed his aim ; the first warning the wretched 
prisoner got that he was suspected of transgressing a prison rule 
was the charge of " ball-and-buck " that tore through his body. 
It was lucky if he was the only one of the group killed. More 
wicked and unjustifiable murders never were committed than 
these almost daily assassinations at the Creek. 

One morning the camp was astonished beyond measure to 
discover that during the night a large, bold spring had burst 
out on the North Side, about midway between the Swamp and 
the summit of the hill. It poured out its grateful flood of pure, 
sweet water in an apparently exhaustless quantity. To the many 
who looked in wonder upon it, it seemed as truly a heaven- 
wrought miracle as when Moses's enchanted rod smote the 
parched rock in Sinai's desert waste, and the living waters 
gushed forth. 

The police took charge of the spring, and every one was com- 
pelled to take his 
regular turn in fill- 
ing his vessel. This 
^vas kept up dur- 
mg our whole stay 
in Anderson ville, 
and every morn- 
ing, shortly after 
daybreak, a thou- 
s.md men could be 
-^een standing in 
line, waiting their 
turns to fill their 
cans and cups with 
^^^ag^^^ the precious liquid. 
I am told by 
comrades who have 
revisited the Stockade of recent years, that the spring is yet 
23 




AT THE SPRING. 



364 AJSTDEESONVILLE. 

lamning as "when we left, and is held in most pious veneration 
by the negros of that vicinity, who still preserve the tradition 
of its miraculous origin, and ascribe to its water wonderful 
grace giving and healing properties, similar to those which 
pioas Cathohcs believe exist in the holy water of the fountain 
at Lourdes. 

I must confess that I do not think they are so very far from 
right. If I could believe that any water was sacred and tliau- 
maturgic, it would be of that fountain which appeared so oppor- 
tunely for the benefit of the perishing thousands of Anderson- 
ville. And when I hear of people bringing water for baptismal 
purposes from the Jordan, I say in my heart, " How much more 
would I value for myself and friends the administration of the 
chrismal sacrament with the diviner flow from that low sand- 
hill in Western Georgia. 



CHAPTER XLYII. 

" SICK CALL," AND THE SCENES THAT ACCOMPANIED IT MUSTEEINa 

THE LAMEj HALT AND DISEASED AT THE SOUTH GATE AN UNUSU- 
ALLY BAD CASE GOING OUT TO THE HOSPITAL ACCOMMODATION 

AND TREATilENT OF THE PATIENTS THERE THE HOKEIBLE SUF. 

FEEING IN THE GANGRENE WARD BUNGLING AMPUTATIONS BY 

BLUNDERING PRACTITIONERS AFFECTION BETWEEN A SAILOR AND 

HIS WARD DEATH OF MY COMRADE. 

Every morning after roll-call, thousands of sick gathered at 
the South Gate, where the doctors made some pretense of 
affording medical relief. The scene there reminded me of the 
illustrations in my Sunday-School lessons of that time when 
" great multitudes came unto Ilim," by the shores of the Sea of 
Galilee, " having with them those that were lame, blind, dumb, 
maimed, and many others." Had the crowds worn the flowing 
robes of the East, the picture would have lacked nothing but 
the presence of the Son of Man to make it complete. Here 
were the burning sands and parching sun ; hither came scores 
of groups of three or four comrades, laboriously staggering 
under the weight of a blanket in which they had carried a 
disabled and dying friend from some distant part of the Stockade. 
Beside them hobbled the scorbutics with swollen and distorted 
limbs, each more loathsome and nearer death than the lepers 
whom Christ's divine touch made whole. Dozens, unable to 
walk, and having no comrades to carry them, crawled painf ally 
along, with frequent stops, on their hands and knees. Every 
form of intense physical suffering that it is possible for disease 
to induce in the human frame was visible at these dady parades 
of the sick of the prison. As over three thousand (three thou- 



856 



A.NDEliSOMVlLLE. 



Band and seventy-six) died in August, there were probably twelve 

thousand dangerous- 
ly sick at any given 
time during the 
month, and a large 
part of these coUec1> 
ed at the South Gate 
every morning. 
Measurably cal- 
loused as we had be- 
come by the daily 
sights of horror 
around us, Ave en- 
countered spectacles 
in these gatherings 
which no amount 
of visible misery 
could accustom us 
to. I remember one 
especiall}^ that burn- 
ed itself deeply into 
my memory. It was 
of a young man — 
not over twenty- 
five — who a few 
weeks ago — his 
clothes looked com- 
paratively new — 
had evidently been 
the picture of manly 
beauty and youthful 
vigor. He had had a 
well-knitjlithe form ; 
dark curling hair 
fell over a forehead 
which had once been 
fair, and his eyes still 
showed that they 

had gleamed with a bold, adventurous spirit. The red clover 




▲ 8T0EY OF REBEL MILITAIIT PRISONS. 857 

leaf on his cap showed that he belonged to the Fir&t Division 
of the Second Corps, the three chevrons on his arm that he 
was a Sergeant, and the stripe at his cuff that he was a veteran. 
Some kind-hearted boys had found him in a miserable condition 
on the ITorth Side, and carried him over in a blanlvet to wliei-e 
the doctors could see him. He had but little clothing on, save 
his blouse and cap. Ulcers of some kind had formed in his 
abdomen, and these were now masses of squirming worms. It 
was so much worse than the usual forms of suffering, that 
quite a little crowd of compassionate spectators gathered 
around and expressed their pity. The sufferer turned to one 
who lay beside him with : 

" Comrade : If we were only under the old Stars and Stripes, 
we wouldn't care a G — d d — n for a few worms, would we ? " 

This was not profane. It was an utterance from the depths 
of a brave man's heart, couched in the strongest language at 
his command. It seemed terrible that so gallant a soul should 
depart from earth in this miserable fashion. Some of us, much 
moved by the sight, went to the doctors and put the case as 
strongly as possible, begging them to do something to alleviate 
his suffering. They declined to see the case, but got rid of us 
by giving us a bottle of turpentine, with directions to pour it 
upon the ulcers to kill the maggots. We did so. It must have 
been cruel torture, and as absurd remedially as cruel, but our 
hero set his teeth and endured, without a groan. He was then 
carried out to the hospital to die. 

I said the doctors made 2i> pretense of affording medical reUef. 
It was hardly that, since about all the prescription for those 
inside the Stockade consisted in giving a handful of sumach 
berries to each of those complaining of scurvy. The berries 
might have done some good, had there been enough of them, 
and had their action been assisted by proper food. As it was, 
they Avere probably nearly, if not wholly, useless. Nothing 
was given to arrest the ravages of dysentery. 

A Umited number of the worst cases were admitted to the 
Hospital each day. As this only had capacity for about one- 
quarter of the sick in the Stockade, new patients could only be 
admitted as others died. It seemed, anyway, like signing a 
man's death warrant to send him to the Hospital, as three out 



358 AITDEKSONVULLE. 

of every four who went out there died. The following from 
the official report of the Hospital shows this : 

Total number admitted 12,400 

Died 8,663 

Exchanged 823 

Took the oath of allegiance 25 

Sent elsewhere 2,889 

Total 12,400 

Average deaths, 76 per cent. 

Early in August I made a successful effort to get out to the 
Hospital. I had several reasons for this : First, one of my 
chums, W. "VV. Watts, of my own company, had been sent out 
a httle while before very sick with scurvy and pneumonia, and 
I wanted to see if I could do anything for him, if he still lived. 
I have mentioned before that for awhile after our entrance into 
Andersonville five of us slept on one overcoat and covered our- 
selves with one blanket. Two of these had already died, leav- 
ing as possessors of the blanket and overcoat, W. W. Watts, 
B. B. Andrews, and myself. 

Next, I wanted to go out to see if there was any prospect of 
escape. I had long since given up hopes of escaping from the 
Stockade. AU our attempts at tunneling had resulted in dead 
failures, and now, to make us wholly despair of success in that 
direction, another Stockade was built clear around the prison, 
at a distance of one hundred and twenty feet from the first 
palisades. It was manifest that though we might succeed in 
tunneling past one Stockade, we could not go be3^ond the 
second one. 

I had the scurvy rather badly, and being naturally slight in 
frame, I presented a very sick appearance to the physicians, and 
was passed out to the Hospital. 

While this was a wretched affair, it was stiU a vast improve- 
ment on the Stockade. About five acres of ground, a httle 
southeast of the Stockade, and bordering on a creek, were 
enclosed by a board fence, around which the guard walked, 
Trees shaded the ground tolerably well. There were tents and 
flies to shelter part of the sick, and in these were beds made of 
pine leaves. There were regular streets and alleys running 
through the grounds, and as the management was in the hands 



A BTUHV ut Ki-.ULL AJ.lJ.lTAiiY PKI80N8. 369 

of our own men, the place was kept reasonably clean and 
orderly — for Anderson ville. 

There was also some improvement in the food. Eice in some 
degree replaced the nauseous and innutritious corn bread, and 
if served in sufficient quantities, would doubtless have promoted 
the recovery of many men dying from dysenteric diseases. 
"VVe also received small quantities of " okra," a phmt peculiar to 
the South, whose pods contained a mucilaginous matter that 
made a soup very grateful to those suffering from scurvy. 

But all these ameliorations of condition were too slight to 
even arrest the progress of the disease of the thousands of 
dying men brought out from the Stockade. These still wore 
' 'le same lice-infested garments as in prison ; no baths or even 
ordinary applications of soap and water cleaned their dirt-grimed 
skins, to give their pores an opportunity to assist in restoring 
them to health ; even their long, lank and matted hair, swarming 
with vermin, was not trimmed. The most ordinary and obvious 
measures for their comfort and care were neglected. If a man 
recovered he did it almost in spite of fate. The medicines given 
were scanty and crude. The principal remedial agent — as far 
as my observation extended — was a rank, fetid species of 
unrectified spirits, which, I was told, was made from sorgum 
seed. It had a light-green tinge, and was about as inviting to 
the taste as spirits of turpentine. It was given to the sick in 
small quantities mixed with water. I had had some experience 
with Kentucky " apple-jack," which, it was popularly believed 
among the boys, would dissolve a piece of the fattest pork 
thrown into it, but that seemed balmy and oily alongside of 
this. After tasting some, I ceased to wonder at the atrocities 
of Wirz and his associates. ISTothing would seem too bad to a 
man who made that his habitual tipple. 

[For a more particular description of the Hospital I must 
refer my reader to the testimony of Professor Jones, in a pre- 
vious chapter.] 

Certainly this continent has never seen — and I fervently 
trust it will never again see — such a gigantic concentration of 
misery as that Hospital displayed daily. The official statistics 
tell the story of this with terrible brevity : There were three 
thousand seven hundred and nine in the Hospital in August ; 



360 



ANDEESONT ILLB. 



one thousand four hundred and eighty-nine — nearly every 
other man — died. The rate afterwards became much higher 
than this. 

The most conspicuous suffering was in the gangrene wards. 
Horrible sores spreading almost visibly from hour to hour, 
devoured men's limbs and bodies. I remember one ward in 
which the ulcerations appeared to be altogether in the back, 
where they ate out the tissue between the slvin and the ribs. 
The attendants seemed trying to arrest the progress of the 
sloughing by drenching the sores with a solution of blue vitriol. 
This was exquisitely painful, and in the morning, when the 
drenching was going on, the whole Hospital rang with the most 
agonizing screams. 

But the gangrene mostly attacked the legs and arms, and 
the legs more than the arms. Sometimes it killed men inside 
of a week ; sometimes they lingered on indefinitely. I remem- 
ber one man in the Stockade who cut his hand with the sharp 
corner of a card of corn bread he was lifting from the ration 
wagon ; gangrene set in immediately, and he died four days 
after. 

One form that was quite prevalent was a cancer of the lower 
lip. It seemed to start at one corner of the mouth, and it fin- 
ally ate the whole side of the face out. Of course the sufferer 

had the greatest trouble in eating 
and drinking. For the latter it was 
customary to whittle out a little 
wooden tube, and fasten it in a tin 
cup, through which he could suck up 
the water. As this mouth cancer 
seemed contagious, none of us would 
allow any one afflicted Avith it to use 
any of our cooking utensils. 

The Rebel doctors at the Hospital 
resorted to wholesale amputations to 
check the progress of the gangrene. 
They had a two hours session of limb-lopping every morning, 
each of which resulted in quite a pile of severed members. I 
presume more bungling operations are rarely seen outside of 
Russian or Turkish hospitals. Their unskilfulness was appar»- 



f*^ 




OANCBB DJ THE MOUTH. 



A STORY OF REBEL MILITARY PlilSOKS. 



361 



ent even to non-scientific observers lilce myself. The standard 
of medical education in the South — as indeed of every other 
form of education — was quite low. The Chief Surgeon of the 
prison, Dr. Isaiah White, and perhaps two or three others, 
seemed to be gentlemen of fair abilities and attainments. The 
remainder were of that class of illiterate and unlearning quacks 
who physic and blister the poor whites and negros in the coun- 
try districts of the South ; who believe they can stop bleeding 
of the nose by repeating a verse from the Bible ; who think 
that if in gathering their favorite remedy of boneset they cut 
the stem upwards it will purge their patients, and if downwards 
it will vomit them, and who hold that there is nothinof so fjood 
for " fits " as a black cat, killed in the dark of the moon, cut 
open, and bound while yet warm, upon the naked chest of the 
victim of the convulsions. 

They had a case of instruments captured from some of our 
field hospitals, which were dull and fearfully out of order. 
With poor instruments and unskilled hands the operations 

became mangling. 

In the Hospital I saw 
an admirable illustra- 
tion of the affection 
which a sailor wiU lavish 
on a ship's boy, whom he 
takes a fancy to, and 
makes his " chicken," 
as the phrase is. The 
United States sloop 
*< Water Witch" had 
recently been captured 
in Ossabaw Sound, and 
her crew brouoht into 
prison. One of her boys 
— a bright, handsome 
little fellow of about 
fifteen — had lost one 
of his arms in the fi^ht. 

OLD SAILOR AITO CHICKEN. ^^ i i ^ 

He was brought into 
the Hospital, and the old fellow whose "■ chicken " he was, was 




S62 AJSTDERSUJN'VILLE. 

allowed to accompany and nurse him, Tliis " old barnacle- 
back" was as surly a growler as ever went aloft, but to his 
'' chicken" he was as tender and thoughtful as a woman. Thoy 
found a shady nook in one corner, and any moment one looked 
in that direction he could see the old tar hard at work at some- 
thing for the comfort and pleasure of his pet. Kow he was 
dressing the wound as deftly and gently as a mother caring for 
a new-born babe ; now he was trying to concoct some relish out 
of the slender materials he could beg or steal from the Quar- 
termaster ; now trj'ing to arrange the shade of the bed of pine 
leaves in a more comfortable manner; now repairing or wash- 
ing his clothes, and so on. 

All the sailors were particularly favored by being allowed 
to bring their bags in untouched by the guards. This 
"chicken" had a wonderful supply of clothes, the handi- 
work of his protector who, lilve most good sailors, was very 
skillful with the needle; lie had suits of fine white duck, 
embroidered with blue in a way that would ravish the heart of 
a fine lady, and blue suits similarly embroidered witli white. No 
belle ever kept her clothes in better order than those Avere. 
When the duck came up from the old sailor's patient washing 
it was as spotless as new-fallen snow. 

I found my chum in a very bad condition. His appetite was 
entirely gone, but he had an inordinate craving for tobacco — 
for strong, black plug — which he smoked in a pipe. He had 
already traded off all his brass buttons to the guards for this. 
I had accumulated a few buttons to bribe the guard to take me 
out for wood, and I gave these also for tobacco for him. 
"When I awoke one morning the man who laid next to me on 
the right was dead, having died sometime during the night. I 
searched his pockets and took M^hat was in them. These were a 
silk pocket handkerchief, a gutta perclia finger ring, a comb, a 
pencil, and a leather pocket-book, makmg in all quite a nice httle 
" find." I hied over to the guard, and succeeded in trading the 
personal estate which I had inherited from the intestate deceased, 
for a handful of peaches, a handful of hardly ripe figs, and a 
long plug of tobacco. I hastened back to Watts, expecting that 
the figs and peaches would do him a world of good. At first 
I did not show him the tobacco, as I was strongly opposed to 



A STORY OF KEBEL MILITAKY I'iilbU.Nsi. 363 

his usino^it, thmkin'::that it was maldno- him much worse. But 
he looked at the tempting peaches and figs Avitli lack-luster 
eyes ; he was too far ^one to care for them. lie pushed them 
back to me, saying faintly : 

" IS'o, you take 'em, Mc ; I don't v>'ant 'em ; I can't eat 'em I" 

I then produced the tobacco, and his face lighted up. , Con- 
cluding that this was all the comfort that he could have, and 
that I might as well gratify liim, I cut up some of the weed, 
filled his pipe and lighted it. He smoked calmly and almost 
happily all the afternoon, hardly speaking a word to me. As 
it grew dark he asked me to bring him a drink. I did so, and as I 
raised him up he said : 

" Mc, this thing's ended. Tell my father that I stood it as 
long as I could, and — " 

The death rattle sounded in his throat, and when I laid him 
back it was all over. Straightening out his limbs, folding his 
hands across his breast, and composing his features as best I 
could, I lay down beside the body and slept till morning, when 
I did what little else I could toward preparing for the grave all 
that -jvas left of my long-suffering little friend. 



DEATH OF WATT'S. 



CHAPTER XLYm. 

DBTEEMIKATION TO ESCAPE DIFFERENT PLANS AND THEEB MBBTTS 

1 PKEFEK THE APPALACHICOLA KOUTE PKEPABATI0N8 FOB 

DEPAUTUEE A HOT DAY THE FENCE PASSED SUCCESSFULLT 

PURSUED BY THE HOUNDS — CAUGHT KETUENED TO THE STOCK- 
ADE. 

After "Watt's death, I set earnestly about seeing what could 
be done in the way of escape. Frank Harney, of the First 
West Yirginia Cavalry, a boy of about my own age and dis- 
position, joined with me in the scheme. I was still possessed 
with my original plan of making my way down the creeks to 
the Flint River, down the Flint River to where it emptied into 
the Appalachicola River, and down that stream to its debouchure 
into the bay that connected with the GuK of Mexico. I was 
sure of finding my way by this route, because, if nothing else 
offered, I could get astride of a log and float down the current- 
The way to Sherman, in the other direction, was long, torturous 
and difficult, with a fearful gauntlet of blood-hounds, patrols and 
the scouts of Hood's Army to be run. I had but little diffi- 
culty in persuading Harney into an acceptance of my views, 
and we began arranging for a solution of the first great prob- 
lem — how to get outside of the Hospital guards. As I have 
explained before, the Hospital was surrounded by a board 
fence, with guards w^alliing their beats on the ground outside. 
A small creek flowed through the southern end of the grounds, 
and at its lower end was used as a sink. The boards of the 
fence came down to the surface of the water, where the Creek 
passed out, but we found, by carefifl prodding with a stick, that 
the hole between the boards and the bottom of the Creek was 



A STORY OF REBEL MILITARY PRISONS. 



365 



raflSciently large to allow the passage of our bodies, and there 
lad been no stakes driven or other precautions used to prevent 
jgress by this channel. A guard was posted there, and prob- 
ibly ordered to stand at the edge of the stream, but it smelled 
!0 vilely in those scorching days that he had consulted his feel- 
ngs and probably his health, by retiring to the top of the bank, 
I rod or more distant. We watched night after night, and 
it last were gratified to find that none went nearer the Creek 
iian the top of this bank. 




PLANNING ESCAPE. 

Then we waited for the moon to come right, so that the first 
art of the night should be dark. This took several days, but at, 
ist we knew that the next night she would not rise until 
etween 9 and 10 o'clock, which would give us nearly two hours of 
tie dense darkness of a moonless Summer night in the South. 
Ve had first thought of saving up some rations for the trip, but 
aen reflected that these would be ruined by the filthy water 
ito which we must sink to go under the fence. It was not 
iflScult to abandon the food idea, since it was very hard to 
)rce ourselves to lay by even the smallest portion of our scanty 
iJtions. 

As the next day wore on, our minds were wrought up into 



A2TDEBS0NVILLE. 

exalted tension by the rapid approach of the supreme moment, 
with all its chances and consequences. The experience of the 
past few months was not such as to mentally fit us for such a haz- 
ard. It prepared us for sullen, uncomplaining endurances, for 
calml}'- contemplating the worst that could come ; but it did not 
strengthen that fiber of mind that leads to venturesome activity 
and daring exploits. Doubtless the weakness of our bodies 
reacted upon our spirits. "We contemplated all the perils that 
confronted us; perils that, now looming up with impending 
nearness, took a clearer and more threatening shape than they 
had ever done before. 

"We considered the desperate chances of passing the guard 
unseen; or, if noticed, of escaping his fire without death or 
severe wounds. But supposing him fortunately evaded, then 
came the gauntlet of the hounds and the patrols hunting 
deserters. After this, a long, weary journey, with bare feet 
and almost naked bodies, through an unknown country abound- 
ing with enemies ; the dangers of assassination by the embit- 
tered populace ; the risks of dying with hunger and fatigue in 
the gloomy depths of a swamp ; the scanty hopes that, if we 
reached the seashore, we could get to our vessels. 

Not one of all these contingencies failed to expand itself to 
aU its alarming proportions, and unite with its fellows to form 
a dreadful vista, hke the valleys liUed with demons and genii, 
dragons and malign enchantments, which confront the heros of 
the "Arabian Nights," when they set out to perform their 
exploits. 

But behind us lay more miseries and horrors than a riotous 
imagination could conceive ; before us could certainly be noth- 
ing worse. We would put life and freedom to the hazard of a 
touch, and win or lose it all. 

The day had been intolerably hot. The sun's rays seemed to 
sear the earth, hke heated irons, and the air that lay on the 
burning sand was broken by wavy fines, such as one sees indi- 
cate the radiation from a hot stove. 

Except the wretched chain-gang plodding torturously back 
and forward on the hillside, not a soul nor an animal could be 
seen in motion outside the Stockade. The hounds were pant* 
ing in their kennel ; the E.ebel officers, half or wholly drunken 



A BTOKT OF REBEL MILITARY I'KloUxNS. 367 

with villainous sorgum whisky, were stretched at fuU length in 
the shade at headquarters ; the half -naked gunners crouched 
under the shadow of the embankments of the forts, the guards 
hung hmply over the Stockade in front of their little perches ; 
the thirty thousand boys inside the Stockade, prone or supine 
upon the glowing sand, gasped for breath — for one draft of 
sweet, cool, wholesome air that did not bear on its wings the 
subtle seeds of rank corruption and death. Everywhere was 
the prostration of discomfort — the inertia of sluggishness. 

Only the sick moved ; only the pain-racked cried out ; only 
the dying struggled ; only the agonies of dissolution could 
make life assert itself against the exhaustion of tlie heat. 

Harney and I, lying in the scanty shade of the trunic of a 
tall pine, and with hearts filled with solicitude as to the out- 
come of what the evening would bring us, looked out over the 
scene as we had done daily for long months, and remained 
silent for hours, until the sun, as if weary with torturing and 
slaying, began going down in the blazing West. The groans 
of the thousands of sick around us, the shrielj;s of the rotting- 
ones in the gangrene wards rang incessantly in our ears. 

As the sun disappeared, and the heat abated, the suspended 
activity was restored. The Master of the Hounds came out 
with his yelping pack, and started on his rounds ; the Rebel 
officers aroused themselves from their siesta and went lazily 
about their duties ; the fifer produced his cracked fife and piped 
forth his unvarying " Bonnie Blue Flag," as a signal for dress 
parade, and drums beaten by unskilled hands in the camps of 
the different regiments, repeated the signal. In the Stockade 
the mass of humanity became full of motion as an ant hill, and 
resembled it very much from our point of view, with the boys 
threading then* way among the burrows, tents and holes. 

It was becoming dark quite rapidly. The moirients seemed 
gaUopiug onward toward the time when we rdust make the 
decisive step. We drew from the dirty rag in which it was 
wrapped the little piece of corn bread that we had saved for 
our supper, carefully divided it into two equal parts, and each 
took one and ate it in silence. This done, we held a final 
consultation as to our plans, and went over each detail care- 
fully, that we might fuUy understand each other under aH 



ui^l^ ANDEB80NVILLH. 

possible circurastances, and act in concert. One point we 
laboriously impressed upon each other, and that was, that under 
no circumstances were we to allow ourselves to be tempted 
to leave the Creek until we reached its junction with the 
Flint Eiver. I then picked up two pine leaves, broke them off 
to unequal lengths, rolled them in my hands behind my back 
for a second, and presenting them to Harney with their ends 
sticking out of my closed hand, said : 

" The one that gets the longest one goes first." 

Ilarney reached forth and drew the longer one. 

We made a tour of reconnoissance. Everything seemed as 
usual, and wonderfully calm compared with the tumult in our 
minds. The Hospital guards were pacing their beats lazily; 
those on the Stockade were drawling listlessly the first " call 
around " of the evening : 

" Post numbah foah I Half-past seven o'clock I and a-l-l's 
w-e-1-1 ! " 

Inside the Stockade was a Babel of sounds, above all 
of which rose the melody of religious and patriotic songs, 
sung in various parts of the camp. From the headquarters 
came the shouts and laughter of the Rebel officers having a 
little " frolic " in the cool of the evening. The groans of the 
sick around us were gradually hushing, as the abatement of the 
terrible heat let all but the worst cases sink into a brief slumber, 
from which they awoke before midnight to renew their outcries. 
But those in the Gangrene wards seemed to be denied even 
this scanty blessing. Apparently they never slept, for their 
shrieks never ceased. A multitude of whip-poor-wills in the 
woods around us began their usual dismal cry, which had never 
seemed so unearthly and full of dreadful presages as noAV. 

It was now quite dark, and we stole noiselessly down to the 
Creek and reconnoitered. We listened. The guard was not 
pacing his beat, as we could not hear his footsteps. A large, 
ill-shapen lump against the trunk of one of the trees on the 
bank showed that he was leaning there resting himself. "We 
watched him for several minutes, but he did not move, and the 
thought shot into our minds that he might be asleep ; but it 
seemed impossible : it was too early in the evening. 

Now, if ever, was the opportunity. Harney squeezed my 



A BTOKT OF KEBEL MILrTABT PKI80NS. 869 

Wmd, stepped noiselessly into the Creek, laid himself gently 
down into the filthy water, and while my heart was beating so 
that I was certain it could be heard some distance from me, 
began making toward the fence. He passed under easily, and 
I raised my eyes toward the guard, while on my strained ear 
fell the soft plashing made by Harney as he pulled himself 
cautiously forward. It seemed as if the sentinel must hear this ; 
he could not help it, and every second I expected to see the 
black lump address itself to motion, and the musket flash out 
fiendishly. But he did not; the lump remained motionless; 
the musket silent. 

When I thought that Harney had gained a sufficient distance 
I followed. It seemed as if the disgusting water would smother 
me as I laid myself down into it, and such was my agitation 
that it appeared almost impossible that I should escape raaldng 
such a noise as would attract the guard's notice. Catching hold 
of the roots and limbs at the side of the stream, I pulled myself 
slowly along, and as noiselessly as possible. 

I passed under the fence without difficulty, — and was out. 
side, and within fifteen feet of the guard. I had lain down 
into the creek upon my right side, that my face might be to^v•ard 
the guard, and I could watch him closely all the time. 

As I came under the fence he was still leaning motionless 
against the tree, but to my heated imagination he appeared to 
have turned and be watching me. I hardly breathed; the 
filthy water rippling past me seemed to roar to attract the 
guard's attention ; I reached my hand out cautiously to grasp a 
root to puU myself along by, and caught instead a dry brancli, 
which broke with a loud crack. My heart absolutely stood still. 
The guard evidently heard the noise. The black lump separated 
itself from the tree, and a straight line which I knew to be his 
musket separated itself from the lump. In a brief instant I lived 
a year of mortal apprehension. So certain was I that he had 
discovered me, and was leveling his piece to fire, that I could 
scarcely restrain myself from springing up and dashing awa}' 
to avoid the shot. Then I heard him take a step, and to my 
unutterable surprise and relief, he walked off farther from the 
Creek, evidently to speak to the man whose beat joined his. 

I puUed away more swiftly, but stiU with the greatest cau 
24 



370 



A2*DKE80H V ULLB. 



tion, until after half-an-hours painful effort I had gotten fully 
one hundred and fifty yards away from the Hospital fence, 
and found Harney crouched on a cypress knee, close to the 
water's edge, watching for me. 

We waited there a few minutes, until I could rest, and calm 
my perturbed nerves down to something nearer their normal 
equihbriura, and then started on. We hoped that if we were 




''OUK rKOGKESS WAS TEiailBLY SLOW EVEKY STEP HUBT 

FEABFULLY." 



as lucky in our next step as in the first one we would reach the 
Flint Eiver by daylight, and have a good long start before the 
morning roll-call revealed our absence. We could hear the 
hounds still baying in the distance, but this sound was too cus- 
tomary to give us any uneasiness. 

But our progress was terribly slow. Every step hurt fear- 
fully. The Creek bed was full of roots and snags, and briers, 
and vines trailed across it. These caught and tore our bare 
feet and legs, rendered abnormally tender by the scurvy. It 



▲ STOKT OF EEBEL MTLITAKT PEIS0N8. 371 

seemed as if every step was marked with blood. The vines 
tripped us, and we frequently fell headlong. We struggled on 
determinedly for nearly an hour, and were perhaps a mile from 
the Hospital. 

The moon came up, and its light showed that the creek con- 
tinued its course through a dense jungle like that we had been 
traversing, while on the high ground to our left were the open 
pine woods I have previously described. 

We stopped and debated for a few minutes. We recalled 
our promise to keep in the Creek, the experience of other 
boys who had tried to escape and been caught by the hounds. 
If we staid in the Creek we were sure the hounds would not 
find our trail, but it was equally certain that at this rate we 
would be exhausted and starved before we got out of sight of 
the prison. It seemed that we had gone far enough to be out 
of reach of the packs patrolling immediately around the Stock- 
ade, and there could be but little risk in trying a short walk on 
the dry ground. We concluded to take the chances, and, 
ascending the bank, we walked and ran as fast as we could for 
about two miles fm-ther. 

All at once it struck me that with all our progress the hounds 
sounded as near as.when we started. I shivered at the thought, 
and though nearly ready to drop with fatigue, urged myself 
and Harney on. 

An instant later their baying rang out on the still night air 
right behind us, and with fearful distinctness. There was no 
mistake now ; they had found our trail, and were running us 
down. The change from fearful apprehension to the crushing 
reality stopped us stock-still in our tracks. 

At the next breath the hounds came bursting through the 
woods in plain sight, and in full cry. We obeyed our first 
impulse ; rushed back into the swamp, forced our way for a few 
yards through the flesh-tearing impediments, until we gained a 
large cypress, upon whose great knees we climbed — thoroughly 
exhausted — just as the yelping pack reached the edge of the 
water, and stopped there and bayed at us. It was a physical 
impossibility for us to go another step. 

In a moment the low-browed villain who had charge of the 



372 



ANDEESOHTILLE. 



hounds came galloping up on his mule, tooting signals to hia 
dogs as he came, on the cow-horn slung from his shoulders. 

He immediately discovered us, covered us with his revolver, 
and yelled out : 

" Come ashore, there, quick : you s ! " 

There was no help for it. We cUmbed down off the knees 




"come ashore, there, quick." 

and started towards the land. As we neared it, the hounds 
became almost frantic, and it seemed as if we would be torn to 
pieces the moment they could reach us. But the master dis- 
mounted and drove them back. He was surly — even savage 
— to us, but seemed in too much hurry to get back to waste 
any time annoying us with the dogs. He ordered us to get 
around in front of the mule, and start back to camp. We 
moved as rapidly as our fatigue and our lacerated feet would 
allow us, and before midnight were again in the hospital, 



A 8T0BY OF REBEL MILITAIIY PEI80N8. 373 

fatigued, filthy, torn, bruised and wretched beyond description 
or conception. 

The next morning we were turned back into the Stockade as 
punishment. 



iXti 



CHAPTER XLIX. 

AUOdBT GOOD LUCK IN NOT MEETING CAPTAIN WIEZ THAT WOB- 

THy'b TEEATMENT of KECAPTHRED PKISONERS — ; SECRET SOCIETIEB 

IN PRISON SINGULAR MEETING AND ITS RESULT DISCOVERY AND 

REMOVAL OF THE OFFICERS AMONG THE ENLISTED MEN. 

Harney and I were specially fortunate in being turned back 
into the Stockade without being brought before Captain "Wirz. 

We subsequently learned that we owed this good luck to 
Wirz's absence on sick leave — his place being supplied by Lieu- 
tenant Davis, a moderate brained Baltimorean, and one of that 
horde of Marylanders in the Rebel Army, whose principal ser- 
vice to the Confederacy consisted in working themselves into 
" bomb-proof " places, and forcing those whom they dis])laced 
into the field. "Winder was the illustrious head of this crowd 
of bomb-proof Rebels from " Maryland, My Maryland 1" whose 
enthusiasm for the Southern cause and consistency in serving it 
only in such places as were out of range of the Yankee artillery, 
was the subject of many bitter jibes by the Rebels — especially 
by those whose secure berths they possessed themselves of. 

Lieutenant Davis went into the war with great brashness. 
He was one of the mob which attacked the Sixth Massachusetts 
in its passage through Baltimore, but, like all of that class of 
roughs, he got his stomach full of war as soon as the real busi- 
ness of fighting began, and he retired to where the chances of 
attaining a ripe old age were better than in front of the Army 
of the Potomac's muskets. We shall hear of Davis again. 

Encountering Captain Wirz was one of the terrors of an 
abortive attempt to escape. When recaptured prisoners were 
brought before him he would frequently give way to paroxysms 



A STORY OF EEBEL MILITARY PRISONS. 



376 




HK SHRIEKED IMPRECATIONS AND CURSES.' 



of screaming rage, so violent as to closely verge on insanity. 
Brandishing the fearful and wonderful revolver — of which I 

have spoken — 

r-sw' TWimim't ^"w^^f^^x ^^ ^^^^^ ^ nian- 

L^.^ 1-.'^^. i^'-^v^ ner as to threat- 

'^^'^'^ J^^/^'^^^^ ^^ ^^® luckless 

captives with in- 
stant death, be 
would sliriek 
out i m p r e c ar 
tions, curses, 
and foul epi- 
thets in French, 
German and En- 
glish, until he 
fairly frothed at 
the mouth. 

There were 
plenty of storieg 
Rurrent in camp of his having several times given away to 
his rage so far as to actually shoot men down in these inter- 
views, and still more of his knocking boys down and jumping 
upon them, until he inflicted injuries that soon resulted in death. 
How true these rumors were I am unable to say of my own 
personal knowledge, since I never saw him kill any one, nor 
have I talked with any one who did. There were a number of 
cases of this kind testified to upon his trial, but they all 
happened among " paroles " outside the Stockade, or among the 
prisoners inside after we left, so I knew nothing of them. 

One of the Old Switzer's favorite ways, of ending these 
seances was to inform the boys that he would have them shot 
in an hour or so, and bid them prepare for death. After keep- 
ing them in fearful suspense for hours he would order them to 
be punished with the stocks, the ball-and-chain, the chain-gang, 
or — if his fierce mood had burned itself entirely out — as was 
quite likely -vvith a man of his shallow brain and vacillating 
temper — to be simply returned to the Stockade. 

Nothing, I am sure, since the days of the Inquisition — or 
■till later, since the terrible punishments visited upon the insur- 



876 



ANDEESONYILLE. 



gents of 1848 by the Austrian aristocrats — has been so diaboli- 
cal as the stocks and chain-gangs, as used by Wirz. At one 
time seven men, sitting in the stocks near the Star Fort — in 
plain view of the camp — became objects of interest to every- 




THE CHAIN GANG. 



body inside. They were never relieved from their painful 
position, but were kept there until all of them died. I think 
it was nearly two weeks before the last one succumbed. AVhat 
they endured in that time even imagination cannot conceive. 
I do not think that an Indian tribe ever devised keener torture 
for its captives. 

The chain-gang consisted of a number of men — varying from 
twelve to twenty-five, aR chained to one sixty-four pound ball. 
They were also stationed near the Star Fort, standing out in 
the hot sun, without a particle of shade over them. When one 
moved they all had to move. They were scourged with the 
dysentery, and the necessities of some one of their number kept 
them constantly in mx)tion. I can see them distinctly yet, 



A 6T0BT OF EEBEL MHJTARY PKISONB. 377 

tramping laboriously and painfully back and forward over that 
burning hillside, every moment of the long, weary Summer 
days. 

A comrade writes to remind me of the beneficent work of 
the Masonic Order. I mention it most gladly, as it Avas the 
sole recognition on the part of any of our foes of our claims to 
human kinship. The churches of all denominations — except 
the sohtary Catholic priest, Father Hamilton, — ignored us as 
wholly as if we were dumb beasts. Lay humanitarians were 
equally indifferent, and the only interest manifested by any 
Rebel in the welfare of any prisoner was by the Masonic 
brotherhood. The Eebel Masons interested themselves in secur- 
ing details outside the Stockade in the cook-house, the commis- 
sary, and elsewhere, for the brethren among the prisoners who 
would accept such favors. Such as did not feel inclined to go 
outside on parole received frequent presents in the way of food, 
and especially of vegetables, which were literally beyond price. 
Materials were sent inside to build tents for the Masons, and I 
think such as made themselves known before death, received 
burial according to the rites of the Order, Doctor AVhite, and 
perhaps other Surgeons, belonged to the fraternity, and the 
wearing of a Masonic emblem by a new prisoner was pretty 
sm'e to catch their eyes, and be the means of securing for the 
wearer the tender of their good offices, such as a detail into the 
Hospital as nurse, ward-master, etc. 

I was not fortunate enough to be one of the mystic brethren, 
and so missed all share in any of these benefits, as w^ell as in 
any others, and I take special pride in one thing : that during 
my whole imprisonment I w^as not beholden to a Rebel for a 
single favor of any kind. The Rebel does not live who can 
say that he ever gave me so much as a handful of meal, a 
spoonful of salt, an inch of thread, or a stick of wood. From 
first to last I received nothing but my rations, except occasional 
trifles that I succeeded in stealing from the stupid officers 
charged with issuing rations. I owe no man in the Southern 
Confederacy gratitude for anything — not even for a kind word. 

Speaking of secret society pins recalls a noteworthy story 
which has been told me since the Avar, of boys whom I knew. 
At the breaking out of hostilities there existed in Toledo a 



378 AlfDEBSONYILLB. 

festive little secret society, such as larking boys frequently 
organize, with, no other object than fan and the usual adoles- 
cent love of mystery. There were a dozen o r so members in it 
who called themselves " The Eoyal Keubens," and were headed 
by a bookbinder named Ned Hopkins. Some one started a 
branch of the Order in Napoleon, O., and among the members 
was Charles E. Reynolds, of that town. The badge of the 
society was a pecuharly shaped gold pin. Eeynolds and Hop- 
kins never met, and had no acquaintance with each other. 
"When the war broke out, Hopkins enlisted in Battery H, First 
Ohio Artillery, and was sent to the Army of the Potomac, 
where he was captured, in the Fall of 18G3, while scouting, in 
the neighborhood of Richmond. Reynolds entered the Sixty- 
Eighth Ohio Volunteer Infantry, and was taken in the neigh- 
borhood of Jackson, Miss., — two thousand miles from the place 
of Hopkins's capture. At Andersonville Hopkins became one 
of the officers in charge of the Hospital. One day a Rebel 
Sergeant, who called the roll in the Stockade, after studying 
Hopldns's pin a minute, said : 

"I seed a Yank in the Stockade to-day a- wearing a pin 
egzackly like that ere." 

This aroused Hopkins's interest, and he went inside in search 
of the other " feller." Having his squad and detachment there 
was little difficulty in finding him. He recognized the pin, 
spoke to its wearer, gave him the " grand hailing sign " of the 
"Royal Reubens," and it was duly responded to. The upshot 
of the matter was that he took Reynolds out with him as clerk, 
and saved his life, as the latter was going down hill very rap- 
idly. Reynolds, in turn, secured the detail of a comrade of the 
Sixty-Eighth who was failing fast, and succeeded in saving his 
life — all of which happy results were directly attributable to 
that insignificant boyish society, and its equally unimportant 
badge of membership. 

Along in the last of August the Rebels learned that there 
were between two and three hundred Captains and Lieu- 
tenants in the Stockade, passing themselves off as enlisted 
men. The motive of these officers was two-fold : first, a chiv- 
alrous wish to share the fortunes and fate of their boys, and 
second, disinclination to gratify the Rebels by the knowledge 



A. 8TOKY OF REBEL. MILITAKY I'KIriOMS. 379 

of the rank of their captives. The secret ^vas so well kept that 
none of us suspected it until the fact was announced by the 
Rebels themselves. They were taken out immediately, and 
sent to Macon, where the commissioned officers' prison was. 
It would not do to trust such possible leaders with us another 
day. 



CHAPTER L. 

FOOD ITS MEAGKBNE88, HTFERIOB QUALITY, AlfD TEERTBLH 8AM»- 

iraeS — KEBEL TESTIMONT ON THE SUBJECT FUTILITY OF BUO- 

OESSFUL EXPLANATION. 

I have in other places dwelt upon the insufficiency and the 
nauseousness of the food. No words that I can use, no insist- 
ence upon this theme, can give the reader any idea of its mortal 
importance to us. 

Let the reader consider for a moment the quantity, quality, 
and variety of food that he now holds to be necessary for 
the maintenance of life and health. I trust that every one 
who peruses this book — that every one in fact over whom the 
Stars and Stripes wave — has his cup of coffee, his biscuits and 
his beefsteak for breakfast — a substantial dinner of roast or 
boiled — and a lighter, but still sufficient meal in the evenmg. 
In all, certainly not less than fifty different articles are set 
before him during the day, for his choice as elements of nour- 
ishment. Let him scan this extended biU-of-fare, which 
long custom has made so commonplace as to be uninteresting 
— perhaps even wearisome to think about — and see what he 
could omit from it, if necessity compelled him. After a reluct- 
ant farewell to fish, butter, eggs, milk, sugar, green and pre- 
served fruits, etc., he thinks that perhaps under extraordinary 
circumstances he might be able to merely sustain life for a 
limited period on a diet of bread and meat three times a day, 
washed down with creamless, unsweetened coffee, and varied 
occasionally with additions of potatos, onions, beans, etc. It 
would astonish the Innocent to have one of our veterans inform 
him that this was not even the first stage of destitution ; that a 



A. 8T0ST OF BEBEL MILITABT PBISONS. 881 

soldier wlio had these was expected to be on the summit level 
of contentment. Any of the boys who followed Grant to 
Appomattox Court House, Sherman to the Sea, or "Pap" 
Thomas till his glorious career culminated with the annihilation 
of Hood, will tell him of many weeks when a slice of fat pork 
on a piece of "hard tack" had to do duty for the breakfast of 
beefsteak and biscuits; when another slice of fat pork and 
another cracker served for the dinner of roast beef and vegeta- 
bles, and a third cracker and sUce of pork was a substitute for 
the supper of toast and chops. 

I say to these veterans in turn that they did not arrive at 
the first stages of destitution compared with the depths to which 
we were dragged. The restriction for a few weeks to a diet of 
crackers and fat pork was certainly a hardship, but the crackers* 
alone, chemists tell us, contain all the elements necessary to 
support life, and in our Army they were always well made and 
very palatable. I believe I risk nothing in saying that one of 
the ordinary square crackers of our Commissary Department 
contained much more real nutriment than the whole of our 
average ration. 

I have before compared the size, shape and appearance of the 
daily half loaf of corn bread issued to us to a half-brick, and I 
do not yet know of a more fitting comparison. At first we got 
a small piece of rusty bacon along with this ; but the size of this 
diminished steadily until at last it faded away entirely, and 
during the last six months of our imprisonment I do not believe 
that we received rations of meat above a half-dozen times. 

To this small n ess was added ineffable badness. The meal 
was ground very coarsely, by dull, weakly propelled stones, 
that imperfectly crushed the grains, and left the tough, hard 
coating of the kernels in large, sharp, mica-like scales, which 
cut and inflamed the stomach and intestines, like handfuls of 
pounded glass. The ahmentary canals of aU compelled to eat 
it were kept in a continual state of irritation that usually term- 
inated in incui-able dysentery. 

That I have not over-stated this evil can be seen by reference 
to the testimony of so coni])etent a scientific observer as Pro- 
fessor Jones, and I add to that unimpeachable testimony the 
following extract from the statement made in an attempted 



382 JUtsTDEBSONYILLS. 

defense of Andersonville bj Doctor R. Randolph Stevenson, 
who styles himself " formerly Surgeon in the Army of the Con- 
federate States of America, Chief Surgeon of the Confederate 
States Military Prison Hospitals, Andersonville, Ga." : 

Y. From the samneness of tJie food, mid from tlie action of the 
'poisonous gases in the densely crowded and filthy Stockade and 
Hospital, the hlood was altered m its constitution, even lefore the 
manrdfestation of actual disease. 

In both the well and the sick, the red corpuscles were dimin- 
ished ; and in all diseases uncomplicated with inflammation, the 
fibrinous element was deficient. In cases of ulceration of the 
mucous membrane of the intestinal canal, the fibrinous element 
of the blood appeared to be increased ; while in simple diarrhea, 
uncomplicated with ulceration, and dependent upon the charac- 
ter of the food and the existence of scurvy, it was either 
diminished or remained stationary. Heart-clots were very 
common, if not universally present, in the cases of ulceration 
of the intestinal mucous membrane ; while in the uncomplicated 
cases of diarrhea and scurvy, the blood was fluid and did nc t 
coagulate readily, and the heart-clots and fibrinous concretions 
were almost universally absent. From the watery condition of 
the blood there resulted various serous effusions into the pericar- 
dium, into the ventricles of the brain, and into the abdominal 
cavity. 

In almost all cases which I examined after death, even in the 
most emaciated, there was more or less serous effusion into the 
abdominal cavity. In cases of hospital gangrene of the extrem- 
ities, and in cases of gangrene of the intestines, heart-clots and 
firm coagula were universally present. The presence of these 
clots in the cases of hospital gangrene, whilst they were absent 
in the cases in which there were no inflammatory symptoms, 
appears to sustain the conclusion that hospital gangrene is a 
species of inflammation (imperfect and irregular though it may 
be in its progress), in which the fibrinous element and coagula- 
bility of the blood are increased, even in those who are suffering 
from such a condition of the blood and from such diseases as 
are naturally accompanied with a decrease in the fibrinous con- 
stituent. 



A STOSY OF BSBEL lOLnAJBY PSISOKB. 38S 

VI. Tha impoverislied condition of the llood^ which led to 
»erous effusions within the ventricles of the hrain^ and a/round the 
hradn cmd spinal cord, cmd into the jpericardial and abdominal 
camlies, was gradually induced hy the action of several causes, 
hut chief y by the character of the food. 

The Federal prisoners, as a general rule, had been reared upon 
wheat bread and Irish potatos ; and the Indian corn so exten- 
sively used at the South, was almost unknown to them, as an 
article of diet previous to their capture. Owing to the impossi- 
bility of obtaining the necessary sieves in the Confederacy for 
the separation of the husk from the corn-meal, the rations of 
the Confederate soldiers, as well as of the Federal prisoners, 
consisted of unbolted corn flour, and meal and grist ; this cir- 
cumstance rendered the corn-bread stiU more disagreeable and 
distasteful to the Federal prisoners. While Indian meal, even 
when prepared with the husk, is one of the most wholesome 
and nutritious forms of food, as has been already shown by the 
health and rapid increase of the Southern population, and 
especially of the negros, previous to the present war, and by 
the strength, endurance and activity of the Confederate soldiers, 
who were throughout the war confined to a great extent to 
unbolted corn-meal ; it is nevertheless true that those who have 
not been reared upon corn-meal, or who have not accustomed 
themselves to its use gradually, become excessively tired of this 
kind of diet when suddenly confined to it without a due propor- 
tion of wheat bread. Large numbers of the Federal prisoners 
appeared to be utterly disgusted with Indian corn, and immense 
piles of corn-bread could be seen in the Stockade and Hospital 
inclosures. Those who were so disgusted with this form of 
food that they had no appetite to partake of it, except in quan- 
tities insufiicient to supply the waste of the tissues, were, of 
course, in the condition of men slowly starving, notwithstand- 
ing that the only farinaceous form of food which the Confede- 
rate States produced in sufficient abundance for the maintenance 
of armies was not withheld from them. In such cases, an 
■urgent feeling of hunger was not a prominent symptom ; and 
even when it existed at first, it soon disappeared, and was suc- 
ceeded by an actual loathing of food. In this state the muscu- 



384 AUDEESONTILLE. 

lar strength was rapidly diminislied, the tissues wasted, and the 
thin, skeleton-hke forms moved about with the appearance oi 
utter exhaustion and dejection. The mental condition con- 
nected with long confinement, with the most miserable sur- 
roundings, and with no hope for the future, also depressed all 
the nervous and vital actions, and was especially active in 
destroying the appetite. The effects of mental depression, and 
of defective nutrition, were manifested not only in the slow, 
feeble motions of the wasted, skeleton-like forms, but also in 
such lethargy, hstlessness, and torpor of the mental faculties as 
rendered these unfortunate men obhvious and indifferent to 
their afflicted condition. In many cases, even of the greatest 
apparent suffering and distress, instead of showing any anxiety 
to communicate the causes of their distress, or to relate their 
privations, and their longings for tJieir homes and their friends 
and relatives, they lay in a listless, lethargic, uncomplaining 
state, taking no notice either of their own distressed condition, 
or of the gigantic mass of human misery by which they were 
surrounded. Nothing appalled and depressed me so much as 
this silent, uncomplaining misery. It is a fact of great interest, 
that notwithstanding this defective nutrition in men subjected 
to crowding and filth, contagious fevers were rare ; and typhus 
fever, which is supposed to be generated in just such a state of 
things as existed at Anderson ville, was unknown. These facts, 
established by my investigations, stand in striking contrast 
with such a statement as the following by a recent English 
writer : 

" A deficiency of food, especially of the nitroc:enous part, 
quickly leads to the breaking up of the animal frame. Plague, 
pestilence and famine are associated with each other in the 
public mind, and the records of every country show how closely 
they are related. The medical history of Ireland is remarkable 
for the illustrations of how much mischief may be occasioned 
by a general deficiency of food. Always the habitat of fever, 
it every now and then becomes the very hot-bed of its propa- 
gation and development. Let there be but a small failure in 
the usual imperfect supply of food, and the lurking seeds of 
pestilence are ready to burst into frightful activity. The famine 
of the present century is but too forcible and illustrative of 



A STOEY OF REBEL MILITAET PRISONS. 385 

tliis. It fostered epidemics which have not been witnessed in 
this generation, and gave rise to scenes of devastation and 
misery which are not surpassed by the most appalling epidemics 
of the Middle Ages. The principal form of the scom-ge was 
known as the contagious famine fever (t}^hus), and it spread, 
not merely from end to end of the country in which it had 
originated, but, breaking through all boundaries, it crossed the 
broad ocean, and made itself painfully manifest in localities 
where it was previously unknown. Thousands fell under the 
virulence of its action, for wherever it came it struck down a 
seventh of the people, and of those whom it attacked, one out 
of nine perished. Even those who escaped the fatal influence 
of it, were left the miserable victims of scurvy and low fever." 
While we readily admit that famine induces that state of the 
system which is the most susceptible to the action of fever 
poisons, and thus induces the state of the entire population 
which is most favorable for the rapid and destructive spread of 
all contagious fevers, at the same time we are forced by the 
facts established by the present war, as well as by a host of 
others, both old and new, to admit that we are still ignorant of 
the causes necessary for the origin of typhus fever. Added to 
the imperfect nature of the rations issued to the Federal 
prisoners, the difficulties of their situation were at times greatly 
increased by the sudden and desolating Federal raids in Vir- 
ginia, Georgia, and other States, which necessitated the sudden 
transportation from Richmond and other points threatened of 
large bodies of prisoners, without the possibility of much pre- 
vious preparation ; and not only did these men suffer in transi- 
tion upon the dilapidated and overburdened line of railroad 
communication, but after arriving at Andersonville, the rations 
were frequently insufficient to supply the sudden addition of 
several thousand men. And as the Confederacy became more 
and more pressed, and when powerful hostile armies were 
plunging through her bosom, the Federal prisoners of Ander- 
sonville suffered incredibly during the hasty removal to Millen, 
Savannah, Charleston, and other points, supposed at the time 
to be secure from the enemy. Each one of these causes must 
be weighed when an attempt is made to estimate the unusual 
mortality among these prisoners of war. 
25 



586 



AJfDEKSONVILLB. 



YII. Scurvy^ arising from sameness of food and imperfect 
nutrition, caused, eitJier directly or indirectly, nine-tentJis of the 
deaths among tJie Federal prisoners at Andersonville. 

Not only were the deaths referred to unknown causes, to 
apoplexy, to anasarca, and to debility, traceable to scurvy and 
its effects ; and not only was the mortality in small-pox, pneu- 




INTEEIOR OF THE STOCKADE THE CREEK AT THE EAST SIDE. 

(Trom a Rebel Photograph in possession of the Author. 



monia, and typhoid fever, and in all acute diseases, more than 
doubled by the scorbutic taint, but even those all but universal 
and deadly bowel affections arose from the same causes, and 
derived their fatal character from the same conditions which 
'f'^oduced the scurvy. In truth, these men at Andersonville 
were in the condition of a crew at sea, confined in a foul ship 
upon salt meat and unvarying food, and without fresh vege- 



A BTOET OF REBEL MTLITABT PEIS0N8. 387 

tables. l!^ot only so, but these unfortunate prisoners were like 
men forcibly confined and crowded upon a ship tossed about 
on a stormy ocean, without a rudder, without a compass, with- 
out a guiding-star, and without any apparent boundary or end 
to their voyage ; and they reflected in their steadily increasing 
miseries the distressed condition and waning fortunes of a 
devastated and bleeding country, which was compelled, in jus- 
tice to her own unfortunate sons, to hold these men in this 
most distressing captivity. 

I saw nothing in the scurvy which prevailed so universally 
at Andersonville, at all different from this disease as described 
by various standard writers. The mortality was no greater 
than that which has afflicted a hundred ships upon long voy- 
ages, and it did not exceed the mortahty which has, upon more 
than one occasion, and in a much shorter period of time, anni- 
hilated large armies and desolated beleaguered cities. The 
general results of my investigations upon the chronic diarrhea 
and dysentery of the Federal prisoners of Andersonville were 
similar to those of the English surgeons during the war against 
Russia. 

IX. Drugs exercised hut little injluence over the progress and 
fatal termination of chronic diarrhea and dysentery in tii^ 
Military Prison and Hospital at Andersonmlle, chiefly hecause 
t))^ proper form of nourishment {milk^ rice, vegetahles, anti-scor- 
hutics, and nourishing animal and vegetable soups) was not 
issued, and could 7iotie procured in sufficient quantities for these 
sick prisoners. 

Opium allayed pain and checked the bowels temporarily, but 
the frail dam was soon swept away, and the patient appeared 
to be but little better, if not the worse, for this merely palliative 
treatment. The root of the difficulty could not be reached by 
drugs ; nothing short of the wanting elements of nutrition 
would have tended in any manner to restore the tone of the 
digestive system, and of all the wasted and degenerated organs 
and tissues. My opinion to this effect was expressed most 
decidedly to the medical officers in charge of these unfortunate 
men. The correctness of this view was sustained by the 
healthy and robust condition of the paroled prisoners, who 



388 ANDEESONVILLE. 

received an extra ration, and who were able to make consider- 
able sums by trading, and who supplied themselves with a 
liberal and varied diet. 

X. Tlie fact that hospital gangrene appeared in the Stochade 
firsty and originated spontaneously, ^without any previous conta- 
gion, and ocmirred sporadically all over the Stockade and Prison 
Hospital, was proof positive that this disease will arise luhenever 
the conditions of crowding, filth, foul air, and had diet are 
present. 

The exhalations from the Hospital and Stockade appeared to 
exert their effects to a considerable distance outside of these 
localities. The origin of gangrene among these prisoners 
appeared clearly to depend in great measure upon the state of 
the general system, induced by diet, exposure, neglect of personal 
cleanliness, and by various external noxious influences. The 
rapidity of the appearance and action of the gangrene depended 
upon the powers and state of the constitution, as well as upon 
the intensity of the poison in the atmosphere, or upon the direct 
application of poisonous matter to the wounded surface. This 
was further illustrated by the important fact, that hospital 
gangrene, or a disease resembling this form of gangrene, attacked 
the intestinal canal of patients laboring under ulceration of the 
bowels, although there were no local manifestations of gangrene 
upon the surface of the body. This mode of termination in 
cases of dysentery was quite common in the foul atmosphere 
of the Confederate States Military Prison Ilospital ; and in the 
depressed, depraved condition of the system of these Federal 
prisoners, death ensued very rapidly after the gangrenous state 
of the intestines was established. 

XI. A scorbutic condition of the system appealed to fa^vor 
the origin of foul ulcers, which frequently took on true hospital 
gangrene. 

Scurvy and gangrene frequently existed in the same indi- 
vidual. In such cases, vegetable diet with vegetable acids 
would remove the scorbutic condition without curing the 
hospital gangrene. . . Scurvy consists not only in an alteration 
in the constitution of the blood, which leads to passive hemor- 



A STOKT OF REBEL MILITART FKI80N8. 



389 



rhagres from the bowels, and the effusion into the various tissues 
of a deeply-colored fibrinous exudation ; but, as we have con- 
clusively shown by posPtnortem examination, this state is also 
attended with consistence of the muscles of the heart, and of 
the mucous membrane of the alimentary canal, and of the 




A SECTION FROM THE EAST SmE OF THE PRISON SnOWING THE DEAD LINE 
(From Rebel Photographs in possession of the Author ) 

sohd parts generally. "W"e have, according to the extent of the 
deficiency of certain articles of food, every degree of scorbutic 
derangement, from the most fearful depravation of the blood 
and the perversion of every function subserved by the blood, 
to those slight derangements which are scarcely distinguishable 
from a state of health. "VVe are as yet ignorant of the true 
nature of the changes of the blood and tissues in scurvy, and a 
wide field for investigation is open for the determination of 
Vhe characteristic changes — physical, chemical, and physio- 



390 ANDEBSONVILLE. 

logical — of the blood and tissues, and of the secretions and 
excretions of scurvy. Such inquiries would be of great value 
in their bearing upon the origin of hospital gangrene. Up to 
the present war, the results of chemical investigations upon 
the pathology of the blood in scurvy were not only contradic- 
tory, but meager, and wanting in that careful detail of the cases 
from which the blood was abstracted which would enable us 
to explain the cause of tlie apparent discrepancies in different 
analyses. Thus it is not yet settled whether the fibrin is 
increased or diminished in this disease ; and the differences 
which exist in the statements of different writers appear to be 
referable to the neglect of a critical examination and record of 
aU the symptoms of the cases from Avhieh the blood was 
abstracted. The true nature of the changes of the blood in 
scurvy can be established only by numerous analyses during 
different stages of the disease, and followed up b}"" carefully 
performed and recorded 2}ost-?noHe7n examinations. With such 
data we could settle such important questions as whether the 
increase of fibrin in scurvy was invariably dependent upon 
some local inflammation. 

XII. Gangrenous spots, follmmd hj rapid destruction of 
tissue^ appeared in some cases in which there liad heen no pre- 
vix)us or existing wound or ahrasion; and without sucJi well 
established facts, it might he assumed that the disease was propor 
gated from one patient to anotlier in evenj case, either hy exhala. 
tions from tJie gangrenous surface or hy direct contact. 

In such a filthy and crowded hospital as that of the Con- 
federate States Military Prison of Camp Sumter, Anderson- 
ville, it was impossible to isolate the wounded from the sources 
of actual contact of the gangrenous matter. The flies swarming 
over the wounds and over filth of eveiy description ; the filthy, 
imperfectly washed, and scanty rags; the limited number of 
sponges and wash-bowls (the same wash-bowl and sponge 
serving for a score or more of patients), were one and aU 
sources of such constant circulation of the gangrenous matter, 
that the disease might ra])idly be propagated from a single 
gangrenous wound. While the fact already considered, that 
a form of moist gangrene, resembling hospital gangrene, was 



A 8TOEY OF REBEL MILITARY PRISONS. 391 

quite common in this foul atmosphere in cases of dysentery, 
both with and without the existence of hospital gangrene upon 
the surface, demonstrates the dependence of the disease upon 
the state of the constitution, and proves in a clear manner that 
neither the contact of the poisonous matter of gangrene, nor 
the direct action of the poisoned atmosphere upon the ulcerated 
surface, is necessary to the development of the disease ; on the 
other hand, it is equally well-established that the disease may 
be communicated by the various ways just mentioned. It is 
impossible to determine the length of time which rags and 
clothing saturated with gangrenous matter will retain the 
power of reproducing the disease when applied to healthy 
wounds. Professor Brugmans, as quoted by Guthrie in his 
commentaries on the surgery of the war in Portugal, Spain, 
France, and the IlTetherlands, says that in 1797, in Holland, 
charpie, composed of linen threads cut of different lengths, 
which, on inquiry, it was found had been already used in the 
great hospitals in France, and had been subsequently washed 
and bleached, caused every ulcer to wliich it was applied to be 
affected by hospital gangrene. Guthrie affirms in the same 
work, that the fact that this disease was readily communicated 
by the application of instruments, lint, or bandages which had 
been in contact with infected pans, was too firmly estabhshed 
by the experience of every one in Portugal and Spain to be a 
matter of doubt. There are facts to show that flies may bo 
the means of communicating malignant pustules. Dr. Wagner, 
who has related several cases of malignant pustule produced 
in man and beasts, both by contact and by eating the flesh of 
diseased animals, which happened in the village of Striessa in 
Saxony, in ISS-i, gives two very remarkable cases which 
occurred eight days after any beast had been affected with the 
disease. Both were women, one of twenty-six and the other 
of fifty years, and in them the pustiiles were well marked, and 
the general symptoms similar to the other cases. The latter 
patient said she had been bitten by a fly upon the back of the 
neck, at which part the carbuncle appeared ; and the former, 
that she had also been bitten upon the right upper arm by a 
gnat. Upon inquiry, AVagner found that the skin of one of 
the infected beasts had been hung on a neighboring wall, and 



S93 ANDEKSONVILLE. 

thought it very possible that the insects might have been 
attracted to them by the smell, and had thence conveyed the 
poison. 

[End of Dr. StevenBon's Statement.] 



The old adage says that " Hunger is the best sauce for poor 
food," but hunger failed to render this detestable stulf palat- 
able, and it became so loathsome that very many actually 
starved to death because unable to force their organs of deglu- 
tition to receive the nauseous dose and pass it to the stomach. 
I was always much healthier than the average of the boys, and 
my appetite consequently much better, yet for the last month 
that I was in Andersonville, it required all my determination 
to crowd the bread down my throat, and, as I have stated 
before, I could only do this by breaking olf small bits at a time, 
and forcing each down as I would a pill. 

A large part of this repulsiveness was due to the coarseness 
and foulness of the meal, the wretched cooking, and the lack of 
salt, but there was a still more potent reason than all these. 
Nature does not intend that man shall live by bread alone, nor 
by any one kind of food. She indicates this by the varying 
tastes and longings that she gives him. If his body needs one 
kind of constituents, his tastes lead him to desire the food that 
is richest in those constituents. When he has taken as much 
as his fystem requires, the sense of satiety supervenes, and he 
"becomes tired" of that particular food. If tastes are not j)er- 
verted, but allowed a free but temperate exercise, they are the 
surest indicators of the way to preserve health and strength by 
a judicious selection of alimentation. 

In this case Nature was protesting by a rebellion of the 
tastes against any further use of that species of food. She was 
saying, as ^Dlaiuly as she ever spoke, that death could only be 
averted by a change of diet, which would supply our bodies 
with the constituents they so sadly needed, and which could 
not be supplied by corn meal. 

How needless was this confinement of our rations to corn 
meal, and especially to such wretchedly prepared meal, is con- 
clusively shown by the Rebel testimony heretofore given. It 
would have been very Little extra trouble to the Rebels to have 



A STORY OF KEBKL MILITAKY Piil8U^b. 393 

had onr meal sifted ; we would gladly have done it ourselves if 
allowed the utensils and opportunity. It would have been as 
Little trouble to have varied our rations with green corn and 
sweet potatos, of which the country was then full. 

A few wagon loads of roasting ears and s\veet potatos 
would have banished every trace of scurvy from the camp, 
healed up the wasting dysentery, and saved thousands of lives. 
Any day that the Rebels had chosen they could have gotten a 
thousand volunteers who would have given their solemn parole 
not to escape, and gone any distance into the country, to gather 
the potatos and corn, and such other vegetables as were read- 
ily obtainable, and bring them into the camp. 

Whatever else may be said in defense of the Southern man- 
agement of military prisons, the permitting seven thousand 
men to die of the scurvy in the Summer time, in the midst of 
an agricultural region, filled with all manner of green vegeta- 
tion, must forever remain impossible of explanation. 



CnAPTER LI. 

SOLICrrUDE as to the fate of ATLANTA AND SHEKMAn's AKMT 

PAUCITY OF NEWS HOW WE HEARD THAT ATLANTA HAD 

FALLEN ANNOUNCEMENT OF A GENERAL EXCHANGE WB 

LEAVE ANDEKSONVILLE. 

"We again began to be exceedingly solicitous over the fate of 
Atlanta and Sherman's Army. We had heard but little directly 
from that front for several weeks. Few prisoners had come in 
since those captured in the bloody engagements of the 20tli, 
22d, and 2Sth of July. In spite of their confident tones, 
and our own sanguine hopes, the outlook admitted of very 
grave doubts. The battles of the last week of July had been 
— look at it in the best light possible — indecisive. Our men 
had held their own, it is true, but an invading army can not 
afford to simply hold its own. Anything short of an absolute 
success is to it disguised defeat. Then we knew that the cav- 
alry column sent out under Stoneman had been so badly 
handled by that ineflBcient commander that it had failed ridic- 
ulously in its object, being beaten in detail, and suffering the 
joss of its commander and a considerable portion of its num- 
bers. This had been followed by a defeat of our infantry at 
Etowah Creek, and then came a long interval in which we 
received no news save what the Rebel papers contained, and 
they pretended no doubt that Sherman's failure was ah'eady 
demonstrated. Next came well-authenticated news that Sher- 
man had raised the siege and fallen back to the Chattahoochee, 
and we felt something of the bitterness of despair. For days 
thereafter we heard nothing, though the hot, close Summer air 
seemed surcharged with the premonitions of a war storm about 
to burst, even as nature heralds in the same way a concentra- 



A STORY OF REBEL MILITAKY PRISONS. 



395 



tion of the mighty force of the elements for the grand crash of 
the thunderstorm. "We waited in tense expectancy for the 
decision of the fates whether final victory or defeat should end 
the long and arduous campaign. 

At night the guards in the perches around the Stockade 
called out every half hour, so as to show the officers that they 
were awake and attending to their duty. The formula for this 
ran thus: 

"Post numbah 1; half -past eight o'clock, and a-l-l-'s 
w-e-1-1!" 

Post No. 2 re})eated this cry, and so it went around. 
One evening when our anxiety as to Atlanta was wrought 
to the highest pitcli, one of the guards sang out : 

" Post numbah f oah — half past eight o'clock — and Atlanta) a 
— gone — t — o — h — I! !''^ 

The heart of every man within hearing leaped to his mouth. 

We looked toward each 
other, almost speechless 
with glad surprise, and 
then gasped out : 

"Did you hear that?" 

The next instant such a 

ringing cheer burst out as 

wells spontaneously from 

the throats and hearts of 

men, in the first ecstatic 

moments of victory — a 

cheer to which our sad- 

IL^^ dened hearts and enfee- 

^ bled lungs had long been 

strangers. 



^ It was the gen- 

uine, honest, manly North- 
ern cheer, as different from 
the shrill Pebel yell as the 
honestmastiff's deep- 
voiced welcome is from the 
howl of the prowling wolf. 
The shout was taken up all over the prison. Even those who 
had not heard the g-uard understood that it meant that "Atlanta 




•* HJXr PAST EIGHT o'clock, AND ATLANTA'S GONE TO 
H — L I " 



396 iLNDERSONVILLK. 

was ours and fairly won," and they took up the acclamation 
with as much enthusiasm as we had begun it. All thoughts of 
sleep were put to flight : we woukl have a season of rejoicing. 
Little knots gathered together, debated the news, and indulged 
in the most sanguine hopes as to the effect upon the Rebels. 
In some parts of the Stockade stump speeches were made. I 
believe that Boston Corbett and his party organized a prayer 
and praise meeting. In our corner we stirred up our tuneful 
friend " jN"osey," who sang again the grand old patriotic hymns 
that set our thin blood to bounding, and made us remember 
that we were still Union soldiers, with higher hopes than that 
of starving and dying in Andersonville. He sang the ever- 
glorious Star Spangled Banner, as he used to sing it around the 
camp fire in happier days, when we were in the field. lie sang 
the rousing " Rally Round the Flag," with its wealth of patri- 
otio fire and martial vigor, and we, with throats hoarse from 
shouting, joined in the chorus until the welkin rang again. 

The Rebels became excited, lest our exaltation of spirits 
would lead to an assault upon the Stockade. They got under 
arms, and remained so until the enthusiasm became less demon- 
strative. 

A few days later — on the evening of the 6th of September 
— the Rebel Sergeants who called the roll entered the Stock- 
ade, and each assembling his squads, addressed them as follows : 

" Pkisoneks ; I am instructed by General Winder to inform 
you that a general exchange has been agreed upon. Twenty 
thousand men will be exchanged immediately at Savannah, 
where your vessels are now waiting for you. Detachments 
from One to Ten will prepare to leave early to-morrow morning." 

The excitement that this news produced was simply inde- 
scribable. I have seen men in every possible exigency that 
can confront men, and a large proportion viewed that 
which impended over them with at least outward composure. 
The boys around me had endured all that we sufiered with sto- 
ical firmness. Groans from pain-racked bodies could not be 
repressed, and bitter curses and maledictions against the Rebels 
leaped unbidden to the lips at the slightest occasion, but there 
was no murmuring or whining. There was not a day — hardly 
an hour — in which one did not see such exhibitions of manly 



A 8TOET OF REBEL MILITAET PRISONS. 



397 



fortitude as made him proud of belonging to a race of which 
every individual was a hero. 

But the emotion which pain and suiTering and danger could 
not develop, joy could, and boys sang, and shouted and cried, 
and danced as if in a delirium. " God's country," fairer than 
the sweet promised land of Canaan appeared to the rapt vision 
of the Hebrew poet prophet, spread out in glad vista before the 
mind's eye of every one. It had come — at last it had come — 
that which we had so longed for, wished for, prayed for, 




OFF FOR " GOD 8 COUNTRY. 



dreamed of ; schemed, planned, toiled for, and for which went 
up the last earnest, dying wish of the thousands of our com- 
rades who would now know no exchange save into that eternal 
" God's country " where 



Sickness and sorrow, pain and death 
Are felt and feared no more. 



Our " preparations " for leaving were few and simple. When 
the morning came, and shortly after tlie order to move, Andrews 



398 ANDERSONVILLE. 

and I picked our well-worn blanket, our tattered overcoat, our 
rude chessmen, and no less rude board, our little black can, and 
the spoon made of hoop-iron, and bade farewell to the hole-in- 
the-ground that had been our home for nearly seven long 
months. 

My feet were still in miserable condition from the lacerations 
received in the attempt to escape, but I took one of our tent 
poles as a staff and hobbled away. We re-passed the gates 
which we had entered on that February night, ages since, it 
seemed, and crawled slowly over to the depot. 

I had come to regard the Eebels around us as such measure- 
less liars that my first impulse was to believe the reverse of 
anything they said to us ; and even now, while I hoped for the 
best, my old habit of mind was so strongly upon me that I had 
some doubts of our going to be exchanged, simply because it 
was a Rebel who had said so. But in the crowd of Rebels who 
stood close to the road upon which we were walking was a 
young Second Lieutenant, who said to a Colonel as I passed : 

"Weil, those fellows can sing 'Homeward Bound,' can't 
they?" 

This set my last misgiving at rest. Now I was certain that 
we were going to be exchanged, and my spirits soared to the 
skies. 

Entering the cars we thumped and pounded toilsomely along, 
after the manner of Southern railroads, at the rate of six or 
eight miles an hour. Savannah was two hundred and forty 
miles a^s^ay, and to our impatient minds it seemed as if we 
would never get there. The route lay the whole distance 
through the cheerless pine barrens which cover the greater 
pai't of Georgia. The only considerable town on the way was 
Macon, Avhich had then a population of five thousand or there- 
abouts. For scores of miles there woidd not be a sign of a 
human habitation, and in the one hundred and eighty miles 
between Macon and Savannah there were only three insignifi- 
cant "villages. There ^v^as a station every ten miles, at which 
the only building was an open shed, to shelter from sun and 
rain a casual passenger, or a bit of goods. 

The occasional specimens of the poor white " cracker " popu- 
lation that we saw, seemed indigenous products of the starved 



A STORY OF REBEL MILITARY PRISONS. 



399 



soil. They suited their poverty-stricken surroundings as well 
as the gnarled and scrubby vegetation suited the sterile sand. 
Thin-chested, round-shouldered, scraggy-bearded, dull-eyed and 
open-mouthed, they all looked ahke — aU looked as ignorant, 
as stupid, and as lazy as they were poor and weak. They were 




GEORGIAN DEVELOPMENT OF THE " PROUD CAUCASIAN.' 



" low-downers" in every respect, and made our rough and simple- 
minded East Tennesseans look like models of elegant and cul- 
tured gentlemen in contrast. 

We looked on the poverty-stricken land with good-natured 
contempt, for we thought we were leaving it forever, and would 



400 AITDERSONYILLS. 

soon be in one which, oompared to it, "was as the fatness d. 
Egypt to the leanness of the desert of Sinai. 

The second day after leaving Andersonville onr train struggled 
across the swamps into Savannah, and rolled slowly down the 
live oak shaded streets into the center of the City. It seemed 
hke another Deserted Village, so vacant and noiseless the 
streets, and the buildings everywhere so overgrown with luxu- 
riant vegetation. The hmbs of the shade trees crashed along 
and broke upon the tops of our cars, as if no train had passed 
that way for years. Through the interstices between the trees 
and clumps of foliage could be seen the gleaming white marble 
of the monuments erected to Greene and Pulaski, looking like 
giant tombstones in a City of the Dead. The unbroken still- 
ness — so different from what we expected on entering the 
metropolis of Georgia, and a City that was an important port 
in Eevolutionary days — became absolutely oppressive. We 
could not understand it, but our thoughts were more intent 
upon tne coming transfer to our flag than, upon any speculation 
as to the cause of the remarkable somnolence of Savannah. 

Finally some little boys straggled out to where our car was 
standing, and we opened up a conversation with them : 

" Say, boys, are our vessels down in the harbor yet ?" 

The reply came in that piercing treble shriek in which a boy 
of ten or twelve makes even his most confidential communica- 
tions : 

" I don't know." 

" "Well," (with our confidence in exchange somewhat dashed,) 
" they intend to exchange us here, don't they ?" 

Another falsetto scream, " I don't know." 

"Well," (with something of a quaver in the questioner's 
voice,) " what are they going to do with us, any way ?" 

" O," (the treble shriek became almost demoniac) " they are 
fixing up a place over by the old jail for you." 

What a sinking of hearts was there then ! Andrews and I 
would not give up hope so speedily as some others did, and 
resolved to believe, for awhile at least, that we were going to 
be exchanged. 

Ordered out of the cars, we were marched along the street. 
A crowd of small boys, full of the curiosity of the animal, 



A 8TOKY OF KKBKL MILITAST PBI80N8. 401 

gathered around us as we marched. Suddenly a door in a 
rather nice house opened ; an angry-faced woman appeared on 
the steps and shouted out : 

''^ Boys I boys!! What are you doin' there ? Come up on the 
steps immejitely ! Come away from them n-a-s-Py things 1 " 

I will admit that we were not prepossessing in appearance ; 
nor were we as cleanly as young gentlemen should habitually 
be ; in fact, I may as well confess that I would not now, if 1 
could help it, allow a tramp, as dil'apidated in raiment, as 
unwashed, unshorn, uncombed, and populous with insects as we 
were, to come within several rods of me. Nevertheless, it was 
not pleasant to hear so accurate a description of our personal 
appearance sent forth on the wings of the wind by a shrill- 
voiced Eebel female, 

A short march brought us to the place " they were fixmg for 
us by the old jail." It was another pen, with high walls of 
thick pine plank, which told us only too plainly how vain were 
our expectations of exchange. 

When we were turned inside, and I realized that the gates of 
another prison had closed upon me, hope forsook me. I flung 
our odious little possessions — our can, chess-board, overcoat, 
and blanket — upon the ground, and, sitting down beside them, 
gave way to the bitterest despair. I wanted to die, O, so 
badly. ISTever in all my life had I desired anything in the 
world so much as I did now to get out of it. Ilad I had pistol, 
knife, rope, or poison, I would have ended my prison life then 
and there, and departed with the unceremoniousness of a French 
leave. I remembered that I could get a quietus from a guard 
•with very little trouble, but I Avould not give one of the bitterly 
hated Rebels the triumph of shooting me. I longed to be 
another Samson, with the whole Southern Confederacy gath- 
ered in another Temple of Dagon, that I might pull down the 
supporting pillars, and die happy in slaying thousands of my 
enemies. 

While I was thus sinking deeper and deeper in the Slough of 
Despond, the firing of a musket, and the shriek of the man who 
was struck, attracted my attention. Looking towards the 
opposite end of the pen I saw a guard bringing his still smok- 
ing musket to a "recover arms," and, not fifteen feet from bim^ 
26 



402 AJfDEKSONVLLLR. 

a prisoner lying on tlie ground in the agonies of death. The 
latter had a pipe in his mouth when he was shot, and his teeth 
still clenched its stem. His legs and arms were drawn up con- 
vulsively, and he was rocking backward and forward on his 
back. The charge had struck hun just above the hip-bone. 

The Rebel officer in command of the guard was sitting on his 
horse inside the pen at the time, and rode forward to see what 
the matter was. Lieutenant Davis, who had come with us from 
Andersonville, was also sitting on a horse inside the prison, and 
he called out in his usual harsh, disagreeable voice : 

" That's all right. Gunnel ; the man's done just as I awdahed 
him to," 

I found that lying around inside were a number of bits of 
plank — each about five feet long, which had been sawed off 
by the carpenters engaged in building the prison. The ground 
being a bare common, was destitute of all shelter, and the pieces 
looked as if they would be quite useful in building a tent. 
There may have been an order issued forbidding the prisoners 
to touch them, but if so, I had not heard it, and I imagine the 
first intimation to the prisoner just killed that the boards were 
not to be taken was the bullet which penetrated his vitals. 
Twenty-five cents would be a liberal appraisement of the value 
of the lumber for which the boy lost his life. 

Half an hour afterward we thought we saw all the guards 
march out of the front gate. There was still another pile of 
these same kind of pieces of board lying at the further side of 
the prison. The crowd around me noticed it, and we aU made 
a rush for it. In spite of my lame feet I outstripped the rest, 
and was just in the act of stooping down to pick the boards up 
when a loud yeU from those behind startled me. Glancing to 
my left 1 saw a guard cocking his gun and bringing it up to 
shoot me. With one frightened spring, as quick as a flash, and 
before he could cover me, I landed fully a rod back in the crowd, 
and mixed with it. The fellow tried hard to draw a bead on me, 
but I was too quick for him, and he finally lowered his gun with 
an oath expre^ive of disappointment in not being able to kill a 
Yankee. 

"Walking back to my place the full ludicrousness of the thing 
dawned upon me so forcibly that I forgot all about my excite- 



A. 8TOKY or RKBEL MLLITABY PKISOHB. 403 

ment and scare, and laughed aloud. Here, not an hour ago, 
I was murmuring because I could find no way to die ; I sio-hed 
for death as a bridegroom for the coming of his bride, and 
vet, when a Rebel had pointed his gun at me, it had nearly 
scared me out of a year's growth, and made me jump farther 
than I could possibly do when my feet were well, and I was m 
good condition otherwise. 



CHAPTEK LII. 

BAYAimAH DEVICES TO OBTAIN MATERIALS FOR A TEST THUS 

XTLTIMATE SUCCESS — KESUMPTION OF TUNNELING ESOATINO BY 

WHOLESALE AND BEING KEOAPTUEED EN MASSE THE OB8TA0LM 

THAT LAY BETWEEN US AND OUR LINES. 

Andrews and I did not let the fate of the boy who was killed, 
nor my own narrow escape from losing the top of my head, 
deter us from farther efforts to secure possession of those cov- 
eted boards. My readers remember the story of the boy who, 
digging vigorously at a hole, replied to the remark of a passing 
traveler that there was probably no ground-hog there, and, 
even if there was, "ground-hog was mighty poor eatin', any 
way," with — 

" Mister, there's got to be a ground-hog there ; our family's 
out o' meat ! " 

That was what actuated us : we were out of material for a 
tent. Our solitary blanket had rotted and worn full of holes 
by its long double duty, as bed-clothes and tent at Anderson- 
ville, and there was an imperative call for a substitute. 

Andi'ews and I flattered ourselves that when we matched our 
collective or individual wits against those of a Johnny his 
defeat was pretty certain, and with this cheerful estimate of 
our own powers to animate us, we set to work to steal the 
boards from under the guard's nose. The Johnny had malice 
in his heart and buck-and-ball in his musket, but his eyes were 
not sufficiently numerous to adequately discharge all the duties 
laid upon him. He had too many different things to watch at 
the same time. I would approach a gap in the fence not yet 
closed as if I intended making a dash through it for liberty, 



A 8T0KT OF BEBEL MILITAKT PBISOITS. 



406 



and when the Johnny had concentrated all his attention on 
letting me have the contents of his gun just as soon as he could 
have a reasonable excuse for doing so, Andrews would pick up 
a couple of boards and slip away with them. Then I would 
fall back in pretended (and some real) alarm, and Andrews 
would come up and draw his attention by a similar feint, while 
I made off with a couple more pieces. After a few hours of 
this strategy, we found ourselves the possessors of some dozen 
planks, with which we made a lean-to, that formed a tolerable 
shelter for our heads and the upper portion of our bodies. As 
the boards were not over five feet long, and the slope reduced 
the sheltered space to about four-and-one-half feet, it left the 
lower part of our naked feet and legs to project " out-of-doors." 
Andrews used to lament very touchingly the sunburning his 
toe-nails were receiving. lie knew that his complexion was 
being ruined for hfe, and all the " Balm of a Thousand Flowers " 

in the world 
would not re- 
store his come- 
ly ankles to 
that condition 
of pristine love- 
liness which 
would admit of 
their introduc- 
tion into good 
society again. 
Another defect 
was that, like 
the fun in a 
practical joke, 



it was all on 
one side ; there 
was not enough 
of it to go clear 
round. It waa 

very unpleasant, when a storm came up in a direction different 
from that we had calculated upon, to be compelled to get out in 




IT WAS VERY ITNPLEASANT WREN A STORM CAME UP. 



^06 



AKDEKSONTILLE. 



the midst of it, and build our house over to faxie the other 
way. 

Still we had a tent, and were that much better off than three- 
fourtlis of our comrades who had no shelter at all. We were 
owners of a brown stone front on Fifth Avenue compared to 
the other fellows. 

Our tent erected, we began a general survey of our new 
abiding place. The ground was a sandy common in the out- 
skirts of Savannah. The sand was covered with a hght sod. 

TheRebeU 
who knew noth- 
ing of our bur- 
rowing propen- 
sities, had neg- 
lected to make 
the plank form- 
ing the walls of 
the Prison pro- 
ject any dis- 
tance below the 
surface of the 
ground, and 
had put up no 
Dead Line 
around the in- 
side ; so that it 
looked as if 
everything was 
arranged ex- 
pressly to in- 
vite us to tunnel out. We were not the boys to neglect such an 
invitation. By night about three thousand had been received 
from Andersonville, and placed inside. When morning came it 
looked as if a colony of gigantic rats had been at work. There 
was a tunnel ievery ten or fifteen feet, and at least twelve hun- 
dred of us had gone out through them during the night. I never 
understood why all in the pen did not foUow our example, 
and leave the guards watching a forsaken Prison. There was 
nothing to prevent it. An hour's industrious work with a haJf 




WHEN WK MATCHED OTJR INTELLECTS AOArXST 
A BEBKl's. 



A STORY OF REBEL MILITARY PRISONS. 407 

canteen vroiild take any one outside, or if a boy was too lazy to 
dig his own tunnel, he could have the use of one of the hundred 
othei's that had been dug. 

But escaping was only begun when the Stockade Avas passed. 
The site of Savannah is virtually an island. On the north is the 
Savannah River ; to the east, southeast and south, are the two 
Ogeechee Rivers, and a chain of sounds and lagoons connecting 
with the Atlantic Ocean. To the west is a canal connecting 
the Savannah and Big Ogeechee Rivers. We found ourselves 
headed off by water whichever way we went. All the bridges 
were guarded, and all the boats destroyed. Early in the morn- 
ing the Rebels discovered our absence, and the whole garrison of 
Savannah was sent out on patrol after us. They picked up the 
boys in squads of from ten to thirty, lurking around the shores 
of the streams waiting for night to come, to get across, or 
engaged in building rafts for transportation. By evening the 
whole mob of us were back in the pen again. As nobody 
was punished for running away, we treated the whole affair 
as a lark, and those brought back first stood around the gate 
and yelled derisively as the others came in. 

That nio-ht bio- fires were built all around the Stockade, and 
a line of guards placed on the ground inside of these. In spite 
of this precaution, quite a number escaped. The next day a 
Dead Line was put up inside of the Prison, twent3^ feet from the 
Stockade. This only increased the labor of burrowing, by 
making us go farther. Instead of being able to tunnel out in 
an hour, it now took three or four hours. That niglit several 
hundred of us, rested from our previous performance, and hope- 
ful of better luck, brought our faithful half canteens — now 
scoured very bright by constant use — into requisition again, 
and before the morning dawned we had gained the high reeds 
of the swamps, where we lay concealed until night. 

In this way we managed to evade the recapture that came to 
most of those who went out, but it was a fearful experience. 
Having been raised in a country where venomous snakes 
abounded, I had that fear and horror of them that inhabitants 
of those districts feel, and of which people living in sections free 
from such a scourge know httle. I fancied that the Southern 
gwamps were filled with aU forms of loathsome and poisonoua 



408 



AKDEESONVILLE. 



reptiles, and it required all my courage to venture into them 
barefooted. Besides, the snags and roots hurt our feet fear- 
fully. Our hope was to find a boat somewhere, in which we 
could float out to sea, and trust to being picked up by some of 
the blockading lleet. But no boat could we find, with all our 
painful and dihgent searcli. TVe learned afterward that the 
Rebels made a practice of breaking up all the boats along the 

shore to prevent 
negros and their 
own deserters from 
escaping to the 
blockading fleet. 




We 



thought 



maldng 



of 

a raft of 
logs, but had we 
had the strength to 
do this, we would 
doubtless have 
thought it too 
risky, since we 
dreaded missing 
the vessels, and 
being carried out 
to sea to perish of 
hunger. During 
THERE WAS A POST AiHD A FERE. the uight wc Came 

to the railroad 
bridge across the Ogeechee. We had some slender hope that 
if we could reach this we might perhaps get across the river, 
and find better opportunities for escape. But these last expect- 
ations were blasted by the discovery that it was guarded. 
There was a post and a fire on the shore next us, and a single 
guard with a lantern was stationed on one of the middle spans. 
Almost famished with hunger, and so weary and footsore that 
we could scared}' move another step, we went back to a cleared 
place on the high ground, and laid down to sleep, entirely reck- 
less as to what became of us. Late in the morning we were 
awakened by the Rebel patrol and taken back to the prison. 
Lieutenant Davis, disgusted wdth the perpetual attempts to 



A STORY OF REBEL MILITARY PRISONS. 



409 



escape, moved the Dead Line out forty feet ironi the Stockade ; 
but this restricted our room greatly, since the number of pris- 
oners in the pen had now risen to about six thousand, and, 
besides, it offered little additional protection against tunneling. 





It Tras not much more difficult to dig 
fifty feet than it had been to dig- thirty 
teet. Davis soon realized this, and put 
^ the Dead Line back to twent}'- feet. 
^S Ills next device Avas a much more sensi- 
ble one. A crowd of one hundred and 
fifty negros dug a trench twenty feet 
wide and five feet deep around the 
^J whole prison on the outside, and this 
ditch was filled with water from the 
^^^ City Water Works. 'No one could cross 
^^•^^ this without attracting the attention of 
the guards. 
CAJSKYESTG AWAY THE DIRT. Still WO wcTc uot discouragcd, and 
Andrews and I joined a crowd that was 
constructing a large tunnel from near our quarters on the east 
side of the pen. We finished the burrow to within a few 
inches of the edge of the ditch, and then ceased operations, to 
await some stormy night, when Ave could hope to get across 
the ditch unnoticed. 

Orders were issued to guards to fire without warning on men 
who Avere observed to be digging or carrying out dirt after 
nightfall. The}^ occasionally did so, but the risk did not keep 
any one from tunneling. Our tunnel ran directly under a sentry 
box. When carrying dirt away the bearer of the bucket had 
to turn his back on the guard and walk directly down the 
street in front of him, two hundred or three hundred feet, to 



410 



AITOEESONVILLE. 



the center of the camp, where he scattered the sand around — so 
as to give uo indication of where it came from. Though we 
always waited till the moon went down, it seemed as if, unless 
the guard were a fool, both by nature and training, he could 




HIS NEW IDEA WAS TO HAVE A HEAVILT LADEN CAKT DEIVEN 
AROUND INSIDE THE DEAD LINE. 

not help taking notice of what was going on under his eyes. I 
do not recall any more nervous promenades in my life, than 
those when, taking my turn, I received my bucket of sand at 
the mouth of the tunnel, and walked slowly away with it. The 
most disagreeable part was in turning my back to the guard. 
Could I have faced him, I had sufficient confidence in my quick- 
ness of perception, and talents as a dodger, to imagine that I 
could make it difficult for him to hit me. But in walking with 
my back to him I was wholly at his mercy. Fortune, however, 
favored us, and we were allowed to go on with our work — night 
after night — without a shot. 

In the meanwhile another happy thought slowly gestated in 
Davis's alleged intellect. IIow^ he came to give birth to two 
ideas ^vith no more than a week between them, puzzled all who 
knew him, and stiU more that he survived this extraordinary 



A STORY OF KEBEL MILITAJKY PBIS0N8. 



411 



strain upon the gray matter of the cerebrum. His ne's^ idea 
was to have driven a heavily-laden mule cart around the inside 
of the Dead Line at least once a day. The wheels or the mule's 
feet broke through the thin sod covering the tunnels and 
exposed them. Our tunnel went with the rest, and those of 
our crowd who wore shoes had humiliation added to sorrow by 
being compelled to go in and spade the hole full of dirt. This 
put an end to subterranean engineering. 

One day one of the boys watched his opportunity, got under 
the ration wagon, and clinging close to the coupliug pole with 
hands and feet, was carried outside. He was detected, however, 
as he came from under the wagon, and brought back. 




THET STOOD AEOUND THE GATE AND YELLED DERISIVELY. 



CHAPTER LIII. 



FKAJfK BEVEKSTOCk's Ari'EMPT AT ESCAPE PASSING OFF AS i 

EEBEL BOY HE REACHES GRISWOLDYILLE BY KAIL, AUD THE! 
STRIKES ACROSS THE COUNTUY FOR SHERMAN, BUT 18 CAUGH: 
WITHIN TWENTY MILLS OF OUR LINES. \ 

One of the shrewdest and nearest successful attempts t( 
escape that came under my notice was that of my friend Ser 




SERGEANT FRANK BEVERSTOCK. 



geant Frank Beverstock, of the Third West Virginia Cavalry , 
of whom I have before spoken. Frank, who was quiv^ -caalL 



A STORY OF REBEL MILITARY PRISONS. 



413 



with a smooth boyish face, had converted to his own use a citi- 
zen's coat, belonging to a young boy, a Sutler's assistant, who 
bad died in Andersonville. lie had made himself a pair of bag 
pantaloons and a shirt from pieces of meal sacks which he had 
appropriated from day to day. He had also the Sutler's assist- 
ant's shoes, and, to crown all, he wore on his head one of those 
hideous looking hats of quilted calico which the Rebels had 
taken to wearing in the lack of felt hats, which they could 
neither make nor buy. Altogether Frank looked enough like a 

Eebel to be dan- 
gerous to trust near 
a country store or 
a stable full of 
horses. "When we 
first arrived in the 
prison quite a 
crowd of the Sa- 
vannahians rushed 
in to inspect us. 
The guards had 
some difficulty in 
keeping them and 
us separate. "While 
perplexed with 
this annoyance, 
one of them saw 
Frank standing in our crowd, and, touching him with his bayo- 
net, said, with some sharpness : 

" See heah ; you must stand back ; jou musn't crowd on them 
prisoners so." 

Frank stood back. He did it promptly but calmly, and then, 
as if his curiosity as to Yankees w^as fully satisfied, he walked 
slowly away up the street, deliberating as he went on a 
plan for getting out of the City. He hit upon an excellent 
one. Going to the engineer of a freight train making ready to 
start back to Macon, he told him that his father was working 
in the Confederate machine shops at Griswoldville, near Macon ; 
that he himself ^v^as also one of the machinists employed there, 




SEE HEAH ; TOU MUST STAND BACK 1 " 



414 AifDEESONVILLK. 

and desired to go thither but lacked the necessary means to paj 
his passage. If the engineer would let him ride up on the 
engine he ^YOuld do work enough to pay the fa,re. Frank told 
the story ingeniously, the engineer and firemen were won over 
and gave their consent. 

No more zealous assistant ever climbed upon a tender thar 
Frank proved to be. He loaded wood with a nervous industry 
that stood him in place of great strength. He kept the tendei 
in perfect order, and anticipated, as far as possible, every wani 
of the engineer and his assistant. They were delighted witt 
him, and treated him with the greatest kindness, dividing theii 
food with him, and insisting that he should share their bed 
when they " laid by" for the night. Frank would have gladlj 
declined this latter kindness with thanks, as he was conscious 
that the quantity of " graybacks " his clothing contained did nol 
make him a very desirable sleeping companion for any one, bul 
his friends were so pressing that he was compelled to accede. 

ILis greatest trouble was a fear of recognition by some one 
of the prisoners that were continually passing by the train load, 
on their ^vay from Andersonville to other prisons. He was one 
of the best known of the prisoners in Andersonville ; bright, 
active, always cheerful, and forever in motion during waking 
hours, every one in the Prison speedily became familiar with 
him, and all addressed him as " Sergea,nt Frankie." If any one 
on the passing trains had caught a glimpse of him, that glimpse 
would have been followed almost inevitably with a shout of — 

" Hello, Sergeant Frankie ! What are you doing there ?" 

Then the whole game would have been up. Frank escaped 
this by persistent watchfulness, and by busying himself on the 
opposite side of the engine, with his back turned to the other 
trains. 

At last when nearing Griswoldville, Frank, pointing to a 
large white house at some distance across the fields, said : 

" ISToAv, right over there is where my uncle lives, and I believe 
I'U just run over and see him, and then walk into Griswoldville.'' 

He thanked his friends f erventl}'' for their kindness^ promised 
to call and see them frequently, bade them good by, and jumped 
off the train. 



A STORY OF KEBEL MILITAKT PRISONS. 



415 









He walked tov^-ards the white house as long as he thought 
he could be seen, and then entered a large corn field 
and concealed himseK in a thicket in the center of it until 

dark, when he made 
his way to the neigh- 
boring woods, and be- 
gan journeying north- 
ward as fast as hia 
legs could carry him. 
When morning broke 
he had made good 
progress, but was ter- 
ribly tired. It was 
not prudent to travel 
by daylight, so he 
gathered himseK 
some ears of corn and 
some berries, of which 
he made his breakfast, 
and finding a suitable 
thicket he crawled 
into it, fell asleep, and 
did not wake up until 
late in the afternoon. 
After another meal of raw corn and berries he resumed 
his journey'', and that night made still better progress. 

lie repeated this for several days and nights — lying in the 
woods in the day time, traveling by night through woods, fields, 
and by-paths — avoiding all the fords, bridges and main roads, 
and living on what he could glean from the fields, that he 
might not take even so much risk as was involved in goino- to 
the negro cabins for food. 

But there are always flaws in every man's armor of caution — 
even in so perfect a one as Frank's. His complete success so 
far had the natural effect of inducing a growing carelessness, 
which wrought his ruin. One evening he started off briskly, 
after a refreshing rest and sleep. He knew that he must be 
very near Sherman's lines, and hope cheered him up with the 
belief that his freedom would soon be won. 







HE BADE THEM GOOD BY. 



416 iLNDEKSONYILLB. 

Descending from the liill, in Tvliose dense brushwood he had 
made his bed all da}'-, he entered a large field full of standing 
corn, and made ];is way between the rows until he reached, on 
the other side, the fence that separated it from the main road, 
across which was another corn-field, that Frank intended 
entering. 

But he neglected his usual precautions on approaching a road, 
and instead of coming up cautiously and carefully rcconnoitering 
in all directions before he left cover, he sprang boldly over the 
fence and strode out for the other side. As he reached the 
middle of the road, his ears were assailed with the sharp cHck 
of a musket being cocked, and the harsh command — 

"Halt! halt, dah, I say ! " 

Turning with a start to his left he saw not ten feet from 
him, a mounted patrol, the sound of whose approach had been 
masked by the deep dust of the road, ipto which his horse's 
hoofs sank noiselessly. 

Frank, of course, yielded without a word, and when sent to 
the officer in command he told the old story about his being an 
employe of the Griswoldville shops, off on a leave of absence 
to make a visit to sick relatives. But, unfortunately, his captors 
belonged to tliat section themselves, and speedily caught him 
in a maze of cross-questioning from which he could not extricate 
himself. It also became apparent from his language tliat he 
was a Yankee, and it was not far from this to the conclusion 
that he was a spy — a conclusion to which the proximity of Sher- 
man's lines, then less than twenty miles distant — greatly 
assisted. 

By the next morning this belief had become so firmly fixed 
in the minds of the Rebels that Frank saw a halter dangling 
alarmingly near, and he concluded the wisest plan was to confess 
who he really was. 

It was not the smallest of his griefs to reahze by how slight 
a chance he had failed. Had he looked down the road before 
he chmbed the fence, or had he been ten mmutes earlier or 
later, the patrol would not have been there, he could have 
gained the next field unperceived, and two more nights of suc- 
cessful progress would have taken him into Sherman's lines at 
Sand Mountain. The patrol which caught him was on the 



A flTOEY OF KEBEL MILITABY PRISONS. 417 

look-out for deserters and shirking conscripts, who had become 
unusually numerous since the fall of Atlanta. 

He Avas sent back to us at Savannah. As he came into the 
prison gate Lientenant Davis was standing near. lie looked 
sternly at Frank and his Rebel garments, and muttering, 

"By God, I'll stop this!" 
caught the coat by the tails, tore it to the collar, and took it 
and his hat away from Frank. 

There was a strange sequel to this episode. A few weeks 
afterward a special exchange for ten thousand was made, and 
Frank succeeded in being included in this. lie was given the 
usual furlough from the paroled camp at Annapolis, and went 
to his home in a little town near Mansfield, O. 

One day while on the cars going — I think to Newark, O., — 
he saw Lieutenant Davis on the train, in citizens' clothes. He 
had been sent by the Rebel Government to Canada with dis- 
patches relating to some of the raids then harassing our Nor- 
thern borders. Davis was the last man in the world to success- 
fully disguise himself. lie had a large, coarse mouth, that 
made him remembered by all who had ever seen him. Frank 
recognized him instantly and said : 

" You are Lieutenant Davis ? " 

Davis replied : 

^' You are totally mistaken, sah, I am " 

Frank insisted that he was right. Davis fumed and blus- 
t?ered, but though Frank was small, he was as game as a bantam 
rooster, and he gave Davis to understand that there had been 
a vast change in their relative positions ; that the one, while 
still the same insolent swaggerer, had not regiments of infan- 
try or batteries of artillery to emphasize his insolence, and the 
other was no longer embarrassed in the discussion by the 
immense odds in favor of his jailor opponent. 

After a stormy scene Frank called in the assistance of some 
other soldiers in the car, arrested Davis, and took him to Camp 
Chase — near Columbus, O., — where he was fuUy identified by 
a number of paroled prisoners. He was searched, and docu- 
ments showing the nature of his mission beyond a doubt, were 
found upon his person. 

A court martial was immediately convened for his trial 
27 



418 AiTDKRSOMVILLK. 

This found him guilty, and sentenced him to be hanged as a 

spy- 

At the conclusion of the trial Frank stepped up to the pris- 
oner and said : 

" Mr. Davis, I believe we're even on that coat, now." 
Davis was sent to Johnson's Island for execution, but influ- 
ences were immediately set at work to secure Executive clem- 
ency. What they were I know not, but I am informed by the 
E.ev. Robert McCune, who was then Chaplain of the One Hun- 
dred and Twenty-Eiglith Ohio Infantry and the Post of John- 
son's Island and who was the spiritual adviser appointed to 
prepare Davis for execution, that the sentence was hardly pro- 
nounced before Davis was visited by an emissary, who told 
him to dismiss his fears, that he should not suffer the punish- 
ment. 

It is likely that leading Baltimore Unionists were enlisted in 
his behalf through family connections, and as the Border State 
Unionists were then potent at "Washington, they readUy secured 
a commutation of his sentence to imprisonment during the war- 
It seems that the justice of this world is very unevenly dis- 
pensed when so much solicitude is shown for the life of such a 
man, and none at all for the much better men whom he assisted 
to destroy. 

The official notice of the commutation of the sentence was 
not published until the day set for the execution, but the cer- 
tain knowledge that it would be forthcoming enabled Davis to 
display a great deal of bravado on approaching what was sup- 
posed to be his end. As the reader can readily imagine, from 
what I have heretofore said of him, Davis was the man to 
improve to the utmost every opportunity to strut his little 
hour, and he did it in this instance. lie posed, attitudinized) 
and vapored, so that the camp and the country were fiUed with 
stories of the wonderful coolness with which he contemplated 
his approaching fate. 

Among other things he said to his guard, as he washed him- 
self elaborately the night before the day announced for the 
execution ; 

" "Well, you can be sure of one thing ; to-morrow night there 
will certainly be one clean corpse on this Island." 



▲ 8T0BT OF REBEL MILITARY PRISONS. 419 

Unfortunately for his braggadocio, he let it leak out in some 
way that he had been well aware all [the time that he would 
not be executed. 

He was taken to Fort Delaware for confinement, and died 
there some time after. 

Frank Beverstock went back to his regiment, and served 
with it until the close of the war. He then returned home, and 
after awhile became a banker at Bowling Green, O. He was- 
a fine business man and became very prosperous. But though 
naturally healthy and vigorous, his system carried in it the seeds 
of death, sown there by the hardships of captivity. He had 
been one of the victims of the Rebels' vaccination ; the virus 
injected into his blood had caused a large part of his right tem- 
ple to slough off, and when it healed it left a ghastly cicatrix. 

Two years ago he was taken suddenly ill, and died before hia 
friends had any idea that his condition was serious. 



CHAPTEE LIY. 

SAViLNNAH PROVES TO BH A CHANGE FOE THE BETTEK ESOATE 

/FROM THE BRATS OF GUARDS COMPARISON BETWEEN WIRZ AND 

'DAVIS A BRIEF INTERVAL OF GOOD RATIONS—- WINDER, THE MAH 

NWirn THE evil eye — the disloyal work oi a shyster. 

After all Savannah was a wonderful improvement on Ander- 
sonville. We got away from the pestilential Swamp and that 
poisonous ground. Every mouthful of air was not laden with 
disease germs, nor every cup of water polluted with the seeds 
of death. The earth did not breed gangrene, nor the atmos- 
phere promote fever. As only the more vigorous had come 
away, we were freed from the depressing spectacle of every 
third man dying. The keen disappointment prostrated very 
many who had been of average health, and I imagine, several 
hundred died, but there were hospital arrangements of some 
kind, and the sick were taken away from an^ong us. Those of 
us who tunneled out had an opportunity of stretching our legs, 
whicli we had not had for months in the overcrowded Stockade 
we had left. The attempts to escape did all engaged in them 
good, even though they failed, since they aroused new ideas and 
hopes, set the blood into more rapid circulation, and toned up 
the mind and system both. I had come away from Anderson- 
vUle with considerable scurvy manifesting itself in my gums 
and feet. Soon these signs almost wholly disappeared. 

We also got away from those murderous little brats of 
Reserves, who guarded us at Anderson ville, and shot men down 
as they would stone apples out of a tree. Our guards now were 
mostly sadors, from the Rebel fleet in the harbor — Irishmen, 
Englislimen and Scandinavians, as free-hearted and kindly as 



A BTOBT OF KEBEL MILITAEY PKI80N8. 421 

saflors always are. I do not think they ever fired a shot at 
one of us. The only trouble we had was with that portion of 
the guard drawn from the infantry of the garrison. They had 
the same rattlesnake venom of the Home Guard crowd wher- 
ever we met it, and shot us down at the least provocation. 
Fortunately they only formed a small part of the sentinels. 

Best of all, we escaped for a while from the upas-hke shadow 
of Winder and Wirz, in whose presence strong men sickened and 
died, as when near some malign genii of an Eastern story. 
The peasantry of Italy believed firmly in the evil eye. Did 
they ever know any such men as "Winder and his satellite, I could 
comprehend how much foundation they could have for such a 
belief. 

Lieutenant Davis had many faults, but there was no com- 
parison between him and the Andersonville commandant. He 
was a typical young Southern man ; ignorant and bumptious as 
as to the most common matters of school-boy knowledge, inor- 
dinately vain of himself and his family, coarse in tastes and 
thoughts, violent in his prejudices, but after all with some 
streaks of honor and generosity that made the widest possible 
difference between him and "Wirz, who never had any. As one 
of my chums said to me : 

" "Wirz is the most even-tempered man I ever knew ; he's 
always foaming mad." 

This was nearly the truth. I never saw Wirz when he was 
not angry ; if not violently abusive, he was cynical and sar- 
donic. Never, in my little experience with him did I detect a 
ghnt of kindly, generous humanity ; if he ever was moved by 
any sight of suffering its exhibition in his face escaped my eye. 
If he ever had even a wish to mitigate the pain or hardship of 
any man the expression of such wish never fell on my ear. 
How a man could move daily through such misery as he 
encountered, and never be moved by it except to scorn and 
mocking is beyond my limited understanding. 

Davis vapored a great deal, swearing big round oaths in the 
broadest of Southern patois ; he was perpetually threatening to 

" Open on ye wid de ahtillery," 
but the only death that I knew him to directly cause or sanction 
was that I have described in the previous chapter. He would 



-^2 



AJTDEESONTILLK. 



not put himself out of the way to annoy and oppress prisoners, 
as Wirz would, but frequently showed even a disposition to 
humor them in some little thing, when it could be done without 
danger or trouble to himself. 

By-and-by, however, he got an idea that there was some 
money to be made out of the prisoners, and he set his wits to 




" WH-AH-TE 1" 



work in this direction. One day, standing at the gate, he gave 
one of his peculiar j^ells that he used to attract the attention of 
the camp with : 
"Wh-ah-3^e!!" 

We all came to " attention," and he announced : 
" Yesterday, while I wuz iu the camps (a Rebel alwiays saji^B 
ca/mjjs,) some of you prisoners picked my pockets of seventy-five 
dollars in greenbacks. Now, I give you notice that I'll not 
send in any moah rations tiU the money's returned to me." 



A STORY OF KEBKL MILITAKT PEI80N8. 423 

This Tvas a very stupid method of extortion, since no one 
believed that he had lost the money, and at all events he had 
no business to have the greenbacks, as the Ilebel la\7s imposed 
severe penalties upon any citizen, and still more upon any 
soldier dealing with, or having in his possession any of "the 
money of the enem3\" We did without rations until night, 
when they were sent in. There was a story that some of the 
boys in the prison had contributed to make up part of the sum, 
and Davis took it and was satisfied. I do not know how true 
the story was. At another time some of the boys stole the 
bridle and halter off an old horse that was driven in with a 
cart. The things were worth, at a liberal estimate, one dollar. 
Davis cut off the rations of the whole six thousand of us for 
one day for this. We always imagined that the proceeds went 
into his pocket. 

A special exchange was arranged between our Navy Depart- 
ment and that of the Rebels, by which all seamen and marines 
amons: us were exchanfjed. Lists of these were sent to the 
different prisons and the men called for. About three-fourths 
of them were dead, but many soldiers divining the situation of 
affairs, answered to the dead men's names, went away with the 
squad and were exchanged. Much of this was through the 
connivance of the Eebel officers, who favored those who had 
ingratiated themselves with them. In many instances money 
was paid to secure this privilege, and I have been informed on 
good authority that Jack Iluckleby, of the Eighth Tennessee, 
and Ira Beverly, of the One Hundredth Ohio, who kept the 
big sutler shop on the North Side at Andersonville, paid Davis 
five hundred dollars each to be allowed to go with the sailors. 
As for Andrews and me, we had no friends among the Rebels, 
nor money to bribe with, so we stood no show. 

The rations issued to us for some time after our arr'val 
seemed riotous luxury to what we had been getting at Ander- 
sonville, Each of us received daily a half-dozen rude and coarse 
imitations of our fondly-remembered hard tack, and with these 
a small piece of meat or a few spoonfuls of molasses, and a 
quart or so of vinegar, and several plugs of tobacco for each 
" hundred." How exquisite was the taste of the crackers and 
molasses 1 It was the first wheat bread I had eaten since my 



424 AJ5fDER80NyiLLJ6. 

entry into Eichmond — nine months before — and molasses had 
been a stranger to me for years. After the corn bread we had 
80 long lived upon, this was manna. It seems that the Com- 
missary at Savannah labored under the delusion that he must 
issue to us the same rations as were served out to the Kebel 
soldiers and sailors. It was some httle time before the fearful 
mistake came to the knowledge of "Winder. I fancy that the 
news almost threw him into an apoplectic fit. Nothing, save 
his beine: ordered to the front, could have caused him such 
poignant sorrow as the information that so much good food 
had been worse than wasted in undoing his work by building up 
the bodies of his hated enemies. 

Without being told, we knew that he had been heard from 
when the tobacco, vinegar and molasses failed to come in, and 
the crackers gave way to corn meal. Still this was a vast 
improvement on Anderson ville, as the meal was fine and sweet, 
wid we each had a spoonful of salt issued to us regularly. 

I am quite sure that I cannot make the reader who has not 
had an experience similar to ours comprehend the wonderful 
importance to us of that spoonful of salt. Whether or not the 
appetite for salt be, as some scientists claim, a purely artificial 
want, one thing is certain, and that is, that either the habit of 
countless generations or some other cause, has so deeply 
ingrained it into our common nature, that it has come to be 
nearly as essential as food itself, and no amount of deprivation 
can accustom us to its absence. Rather, it seemed that the 
longer we did without it the more overpowering became our 
craving. I could get along to-day and to-morrow, perhaps the 
whole week, without salt in my food, since the lack would be 
supplied from the excess I had already swallowed, but at the 
end of that time Nature would begin to demand that I renew 
the supply of saline constituent of my tissues, and she would 
become more clamorous with every day that I neglected her 
bidding, and finally summon Nausea to aid Longing. 

The light artillery of the garrison of Savannah — four baU 
teries, twenty-four pieces — was stationed around three sides of 
the prison, the guns unlimbered, planted at convenient distance, 
and trained upon us, ready for instant use. We could see all 
the grinning mouths through the cracks in the fence. There 
were enough of them to send us as high as the traditional 



A STORY OF EEBKL MILITAKY PEI80N8. 425' 

kite flown by Criideroy. The having at his beck this array of 
frowning metal lent Lieutenant Davis such an importance in 
his own eyes that his demeanor swelled to the grandiose. It 
became very amusing to see him puff up and vaunt over it, as 
he did on every possible occasion. For instance, finding a 
crowd of several hundred lounging around the gate, he would 
throw open the wicket, stalk in with the air of a Jove threat- 
ening a rebellious world with the dread thunders of heaven, 
and shout : 

"W-h-a-a y-e-e! Prisoners, I give you jist two minutes ta 
cleah away from this gate, aw I'll open on ye wid de ahtillery 1 " 

One of the buglers of th« artillery was a superb musician — 
evidently some old " regular " whom the Confederacy had 
seduced into its service, and his instrument was so sweet toned 
that we imagined that it Avas made of silver. The calls h& 
played were nearly the same as we used in the cavalry, and for 
the fii'ot few days we became bitterly homesick every time he 
sent ringing out the old familiar signals, that to us were so 
closely associated with what now seemed the bright and happy 
days when we were in the field with our battalion. If we were 
only back in the valleys of Tennessee with what alacrity w© 
would respond to that " assembly ; " no Orderly's patience would 
be worn out in getting laggards and lazy ones to " fall in for 
roll-call ; " how eagerly we would attend to " stable duty ; "' 
how gladly mount our faithful horses and ride away to " water," 
and what bareback races ride, going and coming. We would 
be even glad to hear " guard " and " drill " sounded ; and there 
would be music in the disconsolate " surgeon's call : " 

"Come — get— your— q-u-i-n-i-n-e; come, getyoar qnlnlne; It'll make you sad ; It'll make yon, 
eick. Come, come." 

O, if we were only back, what admirable soldiers we would be I 
One morning, about three or four o'clock, we were awakened 
by the ground shaking and a series of heavy, dull thumps 
sounding off seaward. Our silver-voiced bugler seemed to be 
awakened, too. He set the echoes ringing with a vigorously 
played "reveille;" a minute later came an equally earnest 
" assembly," and when " boots and saddles " followed, we knew 
that all was not well in Denmark ; the thumping and shaking 



426 ANDEBSONVILLK. 

now hiid a significance. It meant heavy Yankee guns some- 
where near. We heard the gunners hitching up; the bugle 
signal " forward," the wheels roll off, and for a half hour aftei> 
wards we caught the receding sound of the bugle commanding 
" right turn," " left turn," etc., as the batteries marched away. 
Of course, we became considerably wrought up over the mat- 
ter, as we fancied that, knowing w^e w^ere in Savannah, our ves- 
sels were tiying to pass up to the City and take it. The 
thumping and shaking continued until late in the afternoon. 

We subsequent!}^ learned that some of our blockaders, find- 
ing time hanging heavy upon their hands, had essayed a little 
diversion by krlocking Forts Jackson and Bledsoe — two small 
forts defending the passage of the Savannah — about their 
defenders' ears. After capturing the forts our folks desisted 
and came no farther. 

Quite a number of the old Raider crowd had come with us 
from Andersonville. Among these w^as the shyster, Peter 
Bradley. They kept up their old tactics of hanging around the 
gates, and currying favor with the Bebels in every possible 
way, in hopes to get paroles outside or other favors. The great 
mass of the prisoners were so bitter against the Rebels as to 
feel that they w^ould rather die than ask or accept a favor from 
their hands, and they had little else than contempt for these 
trucklers. The Raider crowd's favorite theme of conversation 
with the Rebels was the strong discontent of the boys with the 
manner of their treatment by our Government. The assertion 
that there Avas any such widespread feeling was utterly false. 
We all had confidence — as we continue to have to this day — 
that our Government would do everything for us possible, 
consistent with its honor, and the success of military operations, 
and outside of the little squad of which I speak, not an admis- 
sion could be extracted from anybody that blame could be 
attached to any one, except the Rebels. It was regarded as 
unmanly and unsoldierlike to the last degree, as well as sense- 
less, to revile our Government for the crimes committed by its 
foes. 

But the Rebels were led to believe that we were ripe for 
revolt against our flag, and to side with them. Imagine, if 
possible, the stupidity that would mistake our bitter hatred of 



A STORY OF KEBEL MILITARY PRISONS. 427 

those who were our deadly enemies, for any feeling that 
■would lead us to join hands with those enemies. One day we 
were surprised to see the carpenters erect a rude stand in the 
center of the camp. When it was finished, Bradley appeared 
upon it, in company with some Rebel officers and guards. "We 
gathered around in curiosity, and Bradley began making a 
speech. 

lie said that it had now become apparent to all of us that 
our Government had abandoned us; that it cared little or 
nothing for us, since it could hire as many more quite readily, 
by offering a bounty equal to the pay which would be due us 
now ; that it cost only a few hundred dollars to bring over a 
shipload of Irish, " Dutch," and French, who were only too 
glad to agree to fight or do anything else to get to this coun- 
try. [The peculiar impudence of this consisted in Bradley him- 
self being a foreigner, and one who had only come out under 
one of the later calls, and the influence of a big bounty,] 

Continuing in this strain he repeated and dwelt upon the old 
Me, always in the mouths of his crowd, that Secretary Stanton 
and General Ilallecli had positively refused to enter upon nego- 
tiations for exchange, because those in prison were " only a 
miserable lot of '■ coffee-boilers ' and ' blackberry pickers,' whom 
the Army was better off without." 

The terms " coffee- boiler," and "blackberry-pickers" were 
considered the worst terms of opprobirum we had in prison. 
They were applied to that class of stragglers and skulkers, who 
were only too ready to give themselves up to the enemy, and 
who, on coming in, told some gauzy story about "just having 
stopped to boil a cup of coffee," or to do something else which 
they should not have done, when they were gobbled up. It is 
not risking much to affirm the probability of Bradle}'^ and most 
of his*crowd having belonged to this dishonorable class. 

The assertion that either the great Chief-of-Staff or the still 
greater War-Secretary were even capable of applying such epi- 
thets to the mass of prisoners is too preposterous to need refu- 
tation, or even denial. No person outside the liaider crowd 
ever gave the silly lie a moment's toleration. 

Bradley concluded his speech in some such language as this : 

"And now, f eUow prisoners, I propose to you this : that we 



428 



ANDERSONVILLK. 



unite in informing our Government that unless we are exchanged 
in thirty days, we will be forced by self-preservation to join the 
Confederate army." 

For an instant his hearers seemed stunned at the fellow's 
audacity, and then there went up such a roar of denunciation 
and execration that the air trembled. The Rebels thought that 
the whole camp was going to rush on Bradley and tear him to 
pieces, and they drew revolvers and leveled muskets to defend 
him. The uproar only ceased when Bradley was hurried out of 
the prison, but for hours everybody was savage and sullen, and 
full of threatenings against him, when 
opportunity served. We never saw him 
afterward. 

Angry as I was, I could not help being 
amused at the tempestuous rage of a tall, 
fine-looking and well educated Irish Ser- 
geant of an Illinois regiment. He poured 
forth denunciations of the traitor and the 
Rebels, with the vivid fluency of his Iliber- 
nian nature, vowed he'd " give a year of 

me life, be J s, to have the handling 

of the dirty spalpeen for ten minutes; 
be G — d," and finally in his rage, tore 
off his own shirt and threw it on the 
ground and trampled on it. 

Imagine my astonishment, some time 
after getting out of prison, to find the 
Southern papers publishing as a defense 
against the charges in regard to Ander- 
sonville, the following document, which 
they claimed to have been adopted by " a 
mass meeting of the prisoners : " 
"At a mass meeting held September 28th, 1864, by the Fed- 
eral prisoners confined at Savannah, Ga., it was unanimously 
agreed that the following resolutions be sent to the President 
of the United States, in the hope that he might thereby take 
such steps as in his wisdom he may think necessary for our 
speedy exchange or parole : 




A MAT) SEROEANT. 



A 8T0KT OF KEBEL MTLITAKT PEI80N3. 429 

" Resolved, That while we would declare our unbounded love for the Union, 
for tlie home of our fathers, and for the graves of those we venerate, we 
would beg most respectfully that our situation as prisoners be diligently 
inquired into, and every obstacle consistent with the honor and dignity of 
the Government at once removed. 

" Resolved, That while allowing the Confederate authorities all due praise 
for the attention paid to prisoners, nimibers of our men are daily consigned 
to early graves, in the prime of manhood, far from home and kindred, and 
this is not caused intentionally by the Confederate Government, but by force 
of circumstances ; the prisoners are forced to go without shelter, and, in a 
great portion of cases, without medicine. 

*^ Eesolved, That, whereas, ten thousand of our brave comrades hare 
descended into an untimely grave within the last six months, and as we 
believe their death was caused by the difference of climate, the peculiar kind 
and insufEciency of food, and lack of proper medical treatment; and, 
whereas, those difficulties still remain, we would declare as our firm belief, 
that unless we are speedily exchanged, we have no alternative but to share 
the lamentable fate of our comrades. Must this thing still go on? Is there 
no hope? 

"Resolved, That, whereas, the cold and inclement season of the year is fast 
approaching, we hold it to be our duty as soldiers and citizens of the United 
States, to inform our Governmant that the majority of our prisoners are 
without proper clothing, in some cases being almost naked, and are without 
blankets to protect us from the scorching sun by day or the heavy dews by 
night, and we would most respectfully request the Government to make some 
arrangement whereby we can be supplied with these, to us, necessary articles. 

"Resolved, That, whereas, the term of service of many of our comrades 
having expired, they, having served truly and faithfully for the term of their 
several enlistments, would most respectfully ask their Government, are they 
to be forgotten ? Are past services to be ignored ? Not having seen their 
wives and little ones for over three years, they would most respectfully, but 
firmly, request the Government to make some arrangements whereby they 
can be exchanged or paroled. 

"Resolved, That, whereas, in the fortune of war, it was our lot to become 
prisoners, we have suffered patiently, and are still willing to suffer, if by so 
doing we can benefit the country; but we must most respectfully beg to say, 
that we axe not willing to suffer to further the ends of any party or clique to 
the detriment of our honor, our families, and our country, and we beg that 
this affair be explained to us, that we may continue to hold the Government 
in that respect which is necessary to make a good citizen and soldier, 

" P. BRADLEY, 
"Chairman of Committee in behalf of PriBoncra." 

In regard to the above I will simply say this, that while I 
cannot pretend to know all, or even much that went on around 



430 ANDEESONVLLLE. 

me, I do not think it was possible for a mass meetinf^ of pris- 
oners to have been held without my knowing it, and its essen- 
tial features. Still less was it possible for a mass meeting to 
have been held which would have adopted any such a docu- 
ment as the above, or anything else that a Rebel would have 
found the least pleasure in republishing. The whole thing is a 
brazen falsehood. 



CHAPTEE LV. 

WHY WE WEKE HURKIED OUT OF ANDEKSONVILLE THE EFFECT 

OF THE FALL OF ATLANTA OUB LONGETQ TO HEAE THE NEWS 

AUEIVAL OF SOME FEESH FISH HOW WE KNEW THEY WEBB 

WESTERN BOYS DIFFERENCE IN THE APPEARANCE OF THE SOL- 
DIERS OF THE TWO ARMIES. 

The reason of our being hurried out of Anderson villo under 
the false pretext of exchange dawned on us before we had been 
in Savannah long. If the reader will consult the map of Geor- 
gia he will understand this, too. Let him remember that sev- 
eral of the railroads which now appear were not built then. 
The road upon which Andersonville is situated was about one 
hundred and twenty miles long, reaching from Macon to Amer- 
icus, Andersonville being about midway between these two. 
It had no connections anywhere except at Macon, and it was 
hundreds of miles across the country from Andersonville to 
any other road. "When Atlanta fell it brought our folks to 
within sixty miles of Macon, and any day they were liable to 
make a forward movement, which would capture that place, 
and have us where we could be retaken with ease. 

There was nothing left undone to rouse the apprehensions of 
the Rebels in that direction. The humiliating surrender of 
General Stoneman at Macon in July, showed them what oar 
folks were thinking of, and awakened their minds to the disas- 
trous consequences of such a movement when executed by a 
bolder and abler commander. Two days of one of Kilpatrick's 
swift, silent marches would carry his hard-riding troopers 
around Hood's right flank, and into the streets of Macon, 
where a half hour's work with the torch on the bridges across 



432 AUDEESONVILLB. 

the Ocmulgee and tlie creeks that enter it at that point, •would 
have cut all of the Confederate Army of the Tennessee's com- 
munications. Another day and night of easy marching would 
bring his guidons fluttering through the woods about the Stock- 
ade at Andersonville, and give him a re-inforcement of twelve 
or fifteen thousand able-bodied soldiers, with whom he could 
have held the whole Yalley of the Chattahoochie, and become 
the nether millstone, against which Sherman could have ground 
Hood's army to powder. 

Such a thing was not only possible, but very probable, and 
doubtless would have occurred had we remained in Anderson- 
ville another week. 

Hence the haste to get us away, and hence the lie about 
-exchange, for, had it not been for this, one-quarter at least of 
those taken on the cars would have succeeded in getting off and 
attempted to have reached Sherman's lines. 

The removal went on with such rapidity that by the end of 
September only eight thousand two hundred and eighteen 
remained at Andersonville, and these were mostly too sick to be 
moved ; two thousand seven hundred died in September, fiiteen 
hundred and sixty in October, and four hundred and eighty- 
five in November, so that at the beginning of December there 
were only thirteen hundred and fifty-nine remaining. The 
larger part of those taken out were sent on to Charleston, and 
subsequently to Florence and Salisbury. About six or seven 
thousand of us, as near as I remember, were brought to 
Savannah. 

* * * * ««*« 

"We were all exceedingly anxious to know how the Atlanta 
campaign had ended. So far our information only comprised 
the facts that a sharp battle had been fought, and the result 
was the complete possession of our great objective point. The 
manner of accomplishing this glorious end, the magnitude of 
the engagement, the regiments, brigades and corps participat- 
ing, the loss on both sides, the completeness of the victories, 
€tc., were all matters that we knew nothing of, and thirsted to 
learn. 

The Rebel papers said as little as possible about the capture, 
and the facts in that little were so largely diluted with fiction 



A STORY OF REBEL MILrfARY PRISONS. 438 

as to convey no real information. But few new prisoners Tvero 
coming in, and none of tliese were from Sherman. However, 
toward the last of September, a handful of " fresh fish " were 
turned inside, whom our experienced eyes instantly told us were 
"Western boys. 

There was never any difficulty in telling, as far as he could 
be seen, whether a boy belonged to the East or the West. 
First, no one from the Army of the Potomac was ever 
without his corps badge worn conspicuously; it was rare 
to see such a thing on one of Sherman's men. Then there waa 
a dressy air about the Army of the Potomac that was whoUy 
wanting in the soldiers serving west of the Alleghanies. 
'^' The Army of the Potomac was always near to its base of 
supplies, always had its stores accessible, and the care of the 
clothing and equipments of the men was an essential part of its 
discipline. A ragged or shabbily dressed man was a rarity. 
Dress coats, paper collars, fresh woolen shirts, neat-fitting 
pantaloons, good comfortable shoes, and trim caps or hats, with 
all the blazing brass of company letters an inch long, regimental 
number, bugle and eagle, according to the Regulations, were as 
common to Eastern boys as they were rare among the West- 
erners. 

The latter usually wore blouses, instead of dress coats, and 
as a rule their clothing had not been renewed since the opening 
of the campaign — and it showed this. Those who wore good 
boots or shoes generally had to submit to forcible exchanges 
by their captors, and the same was true of head gear. The 
Rebels were badly off in regard to hats. They did not have 
skill and ingenuity enough to make these out of felt or straw, 
and the make-shifts they contrived of quilted cahco and long- 
leaved pine, were ugly enough to frighten horned cattle. 

I never blamed them much for wanting to get rid of these, 
even if they did have to commit a sort of highway robbery 
upon defenseless prisoners to do so. To be a traitor in arms 
was bad certainly, but one never appreciated the entire magni- 
tude of the crime until he saw a Rebel wearing a cahco or a 
pine-leaf hat. Then one felt as if it would be a great mistake 
to ever show such a man mercy. 

The Army of Northern Virginia seemed to have supplied 
28 



434 ANDKR80NVILLR. 

themselves with head-gear of Yankee manufacture of previous 
years, and they then quit taldng the hats of their prisoners. 
Johnston's Army did not have such good luck, and had to 
keep plundering to the end of the war. 

Another thing about the Army of the Potomac was the 
variety of the uniforms. There were members of Zouave regi- 
ments, wearing baggy breeches of various hues, gaiters, crimson 
fezes, and profusely braided jackets. I have before mentioned 
the queer garb of the " Lost Ducks." {Les Enfants Perd/u^ 
Forty-eighth New York.) 

One of the most striking uniforms was that of the " Four- 
teenth Brooklyn." They wore scarlet pantaloons, a blue jacket 
handsomely braided, and a red fez, with a white cloth A\Tapped 
around the head, turban-fashion. As a large number of them 
were captured, th^ formed quite a picturesque feature of every 
crowd. They ^vere generally good fellows and gallant soldiers. 

Another uniform that attracted much, though not so favor- 
able, attention was that of the Third JN"e^v Jersey Cavalry, or 
First New Jersey Hussars, as they preferred to call themselves. 
The designer of the uniform must have had an interest in a 
curcuma plantation, or else he was a fanatical Orangeman. 
Each uniform would furnish occasion enough for a dozen New 
York riots on the 12th of July. Never wa.s such an eruption 
of the yellows seen outside of the jaundiced livery of some 
Eastern potentate. Down each leg of the pantaloons ran a 
stripe of yeUow braid one and one-half inches wide. The 
jacket had enormous gilt buttons, and was embellished with 
ycHow braid untU it was difficult to teU whether it ^vas blue 
cloth trimmed with yellow, or yellow adorned "svith blue. 
From the shoulders swung a httle, false hussar jacliet, lined 
with the same flaring yellow. The vizor-less cap was similarly 
warmed up with the hue of the perfected sunflower. Their 
saffron magnificence was like the gorgeous gold of the Iflies 
of the field, and Solomon in all his glory could not have been 
arrayed like one of them. I hope he was not, I want to 
retain my respect for him. We dubbed these daffodfl cavaliers 
" Butterflies," and the name stuck to them Uke a poor relation. 

Stfll another distinction that was always noticeable between 
the two aarmies was in the bodily bearing of the men. The 



A STORY OF KEBEL MILITARY PKI80NB. 435 

Army of the Potomac was drilled more rigidly than the "West- 
ern men, and had comparatively few long marches. Its mem- 
bers had something of the stiffness and precision of Enghsh and 
German soldiery, while the Western boys had the long, " reachy" 
stride, and easy swing that made forty miles a day a rather 
commonplace march for an infantry regiment. 

This was why we Imew the new prisoners to be Sherman's 
boys as soon as they came inside, and we started for them to 
hear the news. Inviting them over to our lean-to, we told 
them our anxiety for the story of the decisive blow that gave 
us the Central Gate of the Confederacy, and asked them to 
give it to us. 



CHAPTER LYI. 

▼HAT OAtrSED THE FALL OP ATLANTA A DISSERTATION UPON AJI 

niPOETANT PSYCnOLOGIOAL rKOBLEM THE BATTLE OF JONES- 
BOKO WHY IT WAS FOUGHT HOW SHERMAN DECEIVED HOOD 

A DESPERATE BAYONET CHARGE, AND THE ONLY SUCCESSFUL ONE 

IN THE ATLANTA CAMPAIGN A GALLANT COLONEL AND HOW HI 

DIED THE HEROISM OF SOME ENLISTED MEN — GOING CALMLY 

INTO CERTAIN DEATH. 

An intelligent, quick-eyed, sunburned boy, without an ounce 
of surplus flesh on fcoco or limbs, which had been reduced to 
gray-hound condition by the labors and anxieties of the months 
of battUng between Chattanooga and Atlanta, seemed to be the 
accepted talker of the crowd, since all the rest looked at him, 
as if expecting him to answer for them. lie did so : 

" You want to know about how we got Atlanta at last, do 
you ? Well, if you don't know, I should think you would want 
to. If / didn't, I'd want somebody to teU me all about it just 
as soon as he could get to me, for it was one of the neatest 
little bits of work that ' old Billy ' and his boys ever did, and 
it got away with Hood so bad that he hardly knew what hurt 
him. 

" Well, first, I'll tell you that we belong to the old Fourteenth 
Ohio Volunteers, which, if you know anything about the Army 
of the Cumberland, you'll remember has just about as good a 
record as any that trains around old Pap Thomas — and he 
don't 'low no slouches of .any kind near him, either — you can 
bet $500 to a cent on that, and offer to give back the cent if 
you win. Ours is Jim Steedman's old regiment — you've all 
heard of old Chickamauga Jim, who slashed his division of 



A. STOEY OF BEBEL MTLITAItY PEISONfl. 437 

7,000 fresh men into the Kebel flank on the second day at 
Chickamauga, in a way that made Longstreet wish he'd staid 
on .the Kappahannock, and never tried to get up any little 
sociable with the Westeners. If I do say it myself, I believe 
we've got as good a crowd of square, stand-up, trust-' em-every- 
minute-in-y our -life boys, as ever chawed hard-tack and sow- 
belly. We got all the grunters and weak sjsters fanned out 
the first year, and since then we've been on a business basis, all 
the time. We're in a mighty good brigade, too. Most of the 
regiments have been with us since we formed the first brigade 
Pap Thomas ever commanded, and waded with him through 
the mud of Kentucky, from Wild Cat to Mill Springs, where 
he gave ZoUicoffer just a little the awfulest thrashing that a 
Kebel General ever got. That, you know, was in January, 1862, 
and was the first victory gained by the Western Army, and 
our people felt so rejoiced over it that — " 

" Yes, yes ; we've read all about that," we broke in, " and we'd 
like to hear it again, some other time ; but tell us now about 
Atlanta." 

" All right. Let's see : where was I ? O, yes, talking about 
our brigade. It is the Third Brigade, of the Third Division, of 
the Fourteenth Corps, and is made up of the Fourteenth Ohio, 
Thirty-eighth Ohio, Tenth Kentucky, and Seventy-fourth 
Indiana. Our old Colonel — George P. Este — commands it. 
We never liked him very well in camp, but I tell you he's a 
whole team in a fight, and he'd do so well there that all would 
take to him again, and he'd be real popular for a while." 

" Now, isn't that strange," broke in Andrews, who was given 
to fits of speculation of psychological phenomena : " None of 
us yearn to die, but the surest way to gain the affection of the 
boys is to show zeal in leading them into scrapes where the 
chances of getting shot are the best. Courage in action, like 
charity, covers a multitude of sins. I have known it to make 
the most unpopular man in the battalion, the most popular 
inside of half an hour. Now, M. (addressing himself to me,) 
you remember Lieutenant H., of our battalion. You know he 
was a very fancy young fellow ; wore as ' snipsish ' clothes aa 
the tailor could make, had gold lace on his jacket wherever the 
regulations would aUow it, decorated his shoulders with the 



4:38 JLHDEESONVILLK. 

stunningest pair of shoulder knots I ever saw, and so on. "Well, 
he did not stay with us long after we went to the front. He 
went back on a detail for a court martial, and staid a good 
while. When he rejoined us, he was not in good odor, at all, 
and the boys weren't at all careful in saying unpleasant things 
when he could hear them, A little while after he came back 
we made that reconnoissance up on the Yirginia Road. We 
stirred up the Johnnies with our skirmish line, and while the 
tirini,' was somo- on in front we sat on our horses in line, wait- 
ing for the order to move forward and engage. You know how 
solemn such moments are. I looked down the line and saw 

Lieutenant II at the right of Company , in command 

of it. I had not seen him since he came back, and I sung out : 

" ' Hello, Lieutenant, how do you feel ? 'j 

" The reply came back, promptly, and with boyish cheerful- 
ness: 

" ' Bully, by ; Pm, going to lead seventy men of Convpan/y 

into action to-day ! ' 

" How his boys did cheer him. When the bugle sounded 
' forward", trot,' his company sailed in as if they meant it, and 
swept the Johnnies off in short meter. You never heard any- 
body say anything against Lieutenant after that." 

" You know how it was with Captain G., of our regiment,** 
said one of the Fourteenth to another. " He was promoted 
from Orderly Sergeant to a Second Lieutenant, and assigned to 
Company D. All the members of Company D went to head- 
quarters -in a body, and protested against his being put in their 
company, and he was not. Well, he behaved so well at Chickar 
mauga that the boys saw that they had done him a great 
injustice, and aU those that stiU lived went again to headquar- 
ters, and asked to take all back that they had said, and to have 
him put into the company." 

" Well, that was doing the manly thing, sure ; but go on about 
Atlanta." 

" I was telling about our brigade," resumed the narrator. 
" Of course, we think our regiment's the best by long odds in 
the army — every fellow thinks that of his regiment — but next 
to it come the other regiments of our brigade. There's not a 
cent of discount on any of thenL , 



A 6TORT OF KEBEL MILITABY PEI80NS. 439 

" Sherman had stretched out his right ayray to the south and 
west of Atlanta. About the middle of August our corps, com- 
manded by Jefferson C. Davis, was lying in works at Utoy Creek. 
a couple of miles from Atlanta. We could see the tall steeples 
and the high buildings of the City quite plainly. Things had 
gone on dull and quiet like for about ten days. This wa^ 
longer by a good deal than we had been at rest since we left 
Resaca in the Spring. We knew that something was brewing, 
and that it must come to a head soon. 

"I belong to Company C. Our little mess — now reduced 
to three by the loss of two of our best soldiers and cooks, 
Disbrow and Sulier, killed behind head-logs in front of Atlanta, 
by sharpshooters — had one fellow that we called ' Observer,' 
because he had such a faculty of picking up news in his 
prowling around headquarters. He brought us in so much 
of this, and it was generally so reliable that we frequently 
made up his absence from duty by taking his place. He was 
never away from a fight, though. On the night of the 25th of 
Auo^ust, ' Observer ' came in with the news that something was 
in the wind. Sherman was getting awful restless, and we had 
found out that this always meant lots of trouble to our friends 
on the other side. 

" Sure enough, orders came to get ready to move, and the 
next night we all moved to the right and rear, out of sight of 
the Johnnies. Our well built works were left in charge of 
Garrard's Cavalry, who concealed their horses in the rear, and 
came up and took our places. The Avhole army except the 
Twentieth Corps moved quietly off, and did it so nicely that we 
were gone some time before the enemy suspected it. Then the 
Twentieth Corps pulled out towards the !N"orth, and fell back 
to the Chattahoochie, mailing quite a show of retreat. The 
Rebels snapped up the bait greedily. They thought the siege 
was being raised, and they poured over their works to hurry 
the Twentieth boys off. The Twentieth fellows let them know 
that there was lots of sting in them yet, and the Johnnies Avere 
not long in discovering that it would have been money in their 
pockets if they had let that ' moon-and-star ' (that's the Twen- 
tieth's badge, you know) crowd alone. 

" But the Rebs thought the rest of us were gone for good, 



440 AXDEKSONVILLK. 

and that Atlanta "was saved. Naturally they felt mighty happy 
over it ; and resolved to have a big celebration — a ball, a meet- 
mg of jubilee, etc. Extra trains were run in, with girls and 
women from the surrounding country, and they just had a 
high old time. 

" In the meantime we were going through so many different 
kinds of tactics that it looked as if Sherman was really crazy 
this time, sure. Finally we made a grand left wheel, and then 
went forward a long way in line of battle. It puzzled us a 
good deal, but we knew that Sherman couldn't get us into any 
scrape that Pap Thomas couldn't get us out of, and so it was 
all right. 

" Along on the evening of the 81st our right wing seemed to 
have run against a hornet's nest, and we could hear the mus- 
ketry and cannon speak out real spiteful, but nothing came 
down our way. "We had struck the railroad leading south from 
Atlanta to Macon, and began tearing it up. The jollity at 
Atlanta was stopped right in the middle by the appalling news 
that the Yankees hadn't retreated worth a cent, but had broken 
out in a new and much worse spot than ever. Then there was 
no end of trouble all around, and Hood started part of his 
army back after us. 

" Part of Hardee's and Pat Cleburne's command went into 
position in front of us. We left them alone till Stanley could 
come up on our left, and swing around, so as to cut off their 
retreat, when we would bag every one of them. But Stanley 
was as slow as he always was, and did not come up until it was 
too late, and the game was gone. 

" The sun was just going down on the evening of the 1st of 
September, when we began to see we were in for it, sure. The 
Fourteenth Corps wheeled into position near the railroad, and 
the sound of musketry and artillery became very loud and clear 
on our front and left. We turned a little and marched straight 
toward the racket, becoming more excited every minute. We 
saw the Carlin's brigade of regulars, who were some distance 
ahead of us, pile knapsacks, form in line, fix bayonets, and dash 
off with a rousing cheer. 

" The Rebel fire beat upon them like a Summer rain-storm, 
the ground shook with the noise, and just as we reached the 



A STORY OF REBEL MILITABY PKIS0N8. Ml 

edge of the cotton tiekl, we saAV the remnant of the brigade 
come flying back out of the awful, blasting shower of bullets. 
The whole slope was covered with dead and wounded — ." 

" Yes," interrupts one of the Fourteenth ; " and they made 
that charge right gamely, too, I can tell you. They were good 
soldiers, and well led. AVhen we went over the ^vorks, I 
remember seeing the body of a little Major of one of the regi- 
ments lying right on the top. If he hadn't been killed he'd 
been inside in a half-a-dozen steps more. There's no mistake 
about it ; those regulars vrill fight." 

" When we saw this," resumed the narrator, " it set our 
fellows fairly wild ; they became just crying mad ; I never saw 
them so before. The order came to strip for the charge, and 
our knapsacks were piled in half a minute. A Lieutenant of 
our company, who was then on the staff of Gen. Baird, our 
division commander, rode slowly down the Une and gave us 
our instructions to load our guns, fix bayonets, and hold lire 
until we were on top of the Kebel works. Then Colonel Este 
*sang out clear and steady as a bugle signal : 

" ' Brigade, forward ! Guide center 1 March ! ! ' 
" and we started. Heavens, how they did let into us, as we 
came up into range. They had ten pieces of artillery, and 
more men behind the breastworks than we had in line, and the 
fire they poured on us was simply withering. We walked 
across the hundreds of dead and dying of the regular brigade, 
and at every step our own men fell down among them. General 
Baird's horse was shot down, and the General thrown far over 
his head, but he jumped up and ran alongside of us. Major 
Wilson, our regimental commander, fell mortally ^vounded ; 
Lieutenant Kirk was killed, and also Captain Sto]:)fard, Adjutant 
General of the brigade. Lieutenants Cobb and Mitchell dropped 
with wounds that proved fatal in a few days. Captain Ogan 
lost an arm, one-third of the enlisted men fell, but we went 
straight ahead, the grape and the musketry becoming worse 
every step, until we gained the edge of the hill, where we were 
checked a minute by the brush, which the Kebels had fixed up 
in the shape of abattis. Just then a terrible fire from a new 
direction, our left, swept down the whole length of our line. 
The Colonel of the Seventeenth New York — as gallant a man 



442* AKDEBSONVILLi;. 

as ever lived — saw the new trouble, took his regiment in on 
the run, and relieved us of this, but he was himself mortally 
wounded. If our boys were half -crazy before, they were frantic 
now, and as we got out of the entanglement of the brush, we 
raised a fearful yell and raij at the works. We climbed the 
sides, fired right down into the defenders, and then began with 
the bayonet and sword. For a few minutes it was simply 
awful. On both sides men acted like infuriated devils. They 
dashed each other's brains out with clubbed muskets ; bayonets 
were driven into men's bodies up to the muzzle of the gun ; 
officers ran their swords through their opponents, and revolvers, 
after being emptied into the faces of the Rebels, were thrown 
with desperate force into the ranks. In our regiment was a 
stout German butcher named Frank Fleck. He became so 
excited that he threw down his sword, and rushed among the 
Eebels with his bare fists, knocking down a swath of them. 
He yelled to the first Rebel he met : 

" ' Py Gott, I've no patience mit you.' 
" and knocked him sprawling. He caught hold of the commander 
of the Rebel Brigade, and snatched him back over the works 
by main strength. "Wonderful to say, he escaped unhurt, but 
the boys will probably not soon let him hear the last of 

" Ty Gott, I've no patience mit you.' 

" The Tenth Kentucky, by the queerest luck in the world, 
was matched against the Rebel Ninth Kentucky. The com- 
manders of the two regiments were brothers-in-laAV, and the 
men relatives, friends, acquaintances and schoolmates. They 
hated each other accordingly, and the fight between them was 
more bitter, if possible, than anywhere else on the line. The 
Thirty-Eighth Ohio and Seventy-fourth Indiana put in some 
work that was just magnificent. We hadn't time to look at it 
then, but the dead and wounded piled up after the fight told 
the story. 

"We gradually forced our way over the works, but the Reb- 
els were game to the last, and we had to make them surrender 
almost one at a time. The artillerymen tried to fire on us 
when we were so close we could lay our hands on the guns. 

" Finally nearly all in the works surrendered, and were dis- 
armed and marched back. Just then an aid came dashing up 



1. 8T0ET OF KEBEL MTLITAET PKI80NS. 443 

vrith the information that ^ve must turn the works, and get 
read}'- to receive Hardee, who was advancing to retake the posi- 
tion. TVe snatched up some shovels lying near, and began 
work. We had no time to remove the dead and dying Kebels 
on the works, and the dirt we threw covered them up. It 
proved a false alarm, Hardee had as much as he could do to 
save his own hide, and the affair ended about dark. 

" When we came to count up what we had gained, we found 
that we had actually taken more prisoners from behind breast- 
works than there were in our brigade when we started the 
charge. We had made the only really successful bayonet 
charge of the campaign. Every other time since we left Chat- 
tanooga the part}^ standing on the defensive had been successful. 
Here we had taken strong double lines, with ten guns, seven 
battle flags, and over two thousand prisoners. We had lost 
terribly — not less than one-third of the brigade, and many of 
our best men. Our regiment went into the battle with fifteen 
officers ; nme of these were killed or wounded, and seven of 
the nine lost either their limbs or lives. The Thirty-Eighth 
Ohio, and the other regiments of the brigade lost equally 
heavy. We thought Chickamauga awful, but Jonesboro dis- 
counted it." 

" Do you know," said another of the Fourteenth, " I heard 
our Surgeon telling about how that Colonel Grower, of the 
Seventeenth 'New York, who came in so splendidly on our left, 
died ? They say he was a Wall Street broker, before the war. 
He was hit shortly after he led his regiment in, and after the 
fight, was carried back to the hospital. While our Surgeon 
was going the rounds Colonel Grower called him, and said 
quietly, ' When you get through with the men, come and see 
me, please.' 

" The Doctor would have attended to him then, but Grower 
wouldn't let him. After he got through he went back to 
Grower, examined his wound, and told him that he could only 
live a few hours. Grower received the news tranquilly, had 
the Doctor ^vrite a letter to his wife, and gave him his things 
to send her, and then grasping the Doctor's hand, he said : 

" ' Doctor, I've just one more favor to ask ; will you grant it f ' 

" The Doctor said, ' Certainly ; what is it ? ' 



444 ANDEESONVILLB. 

" * You say I can't live but a few hours ? ' 

" ' Yes ; that is true.' 

" * And that I will likely bo in great pain ? ' 

" ' I am sorry to say so.' 

" ' Well, then, do give me morphia enough to put me to 
sleep, so that I will wake up only in another world.' 

" The Doctor did so ; Colonel Grower thanked him ; wrung 
his hand, bade him good-by, and went to sleep to wake no 
more." 

" Do 3"ou believe in presentiments and superstitions ? " said 
another of the Fourteenth. " There was Fisher Pray, Orderly 
Sergeant of Company I. He came from "Waterville, O., ^vhere 
his folks are now living. The day before we started out ho 
had a presentiment that we were going into a fight, and that 
he would be killed. He couldn't shake it off. He told the 
Lieutenant, and some of the boys about it, and they tried to 
ridicule him out of it, but it was no good. When the sharp 
firing broke out in front some of the boys said, ' Fisher, I do 
beheve you are right,' and he nodded his h^jad mournfully. 
When we were piling knapsacks for the charge, the Lieutenant, 
who was a great friend of Fisher's, said : 

" ' Fisher, you stay here and guard the knapsacks.' 

" Fisher's face blazed in an instant. 

" ' No, sir,' said he ; I never shirked a fight yet, and I won't 
begin now.' 

" So he went into the fight, and was killed, as he knew he 
would be. ISTow, that's what /call nerve." 

" The same thing was true of Sergeant Arthur Tarbox, of 
Company A," said the narrator ; " he had a presentiment, too ; 
he knew he was going to be killed, ii he went in, and he was 
offered an honorable chance to stay out, but he would not take 
it, and went in and was killed." 

" Well, we staid there the next day, buried our dead, took 
care of our wounded, and gathered up the plunder we had 
taken from the Johnnies. The rest of the army went off, ' hot 
blocks,' after Hardee and the rest of Hood's army, which it was 
hoped would be caught outside of entrenchments. But Hood 
had too much the start, and got into the works at Lovejoy, 
ahead of our fellows. The night before we heard several very 



▲ 8T0ET OF KEBEl, MULITAKY PitlBONS. 



445 



loud explosions up to the north. We guessed what that meant, 
and so did the T\Yentieth Corps, who were lying back at the 
Chattahoochee, and the next morning the General commanding 
— Slocuni — sent out a reconnoissance. It was met by the 
Mayor of Atlanta, w^ho said that the Rebels had blown up their 
stores and retreated. The Twentieth Corps then came in and 
took possession of the City, and the next day — the 3d — Sher- 
man came in, and issued an order declaring the campaign at an 
end, and that we would rest awhile and relit. 

" We laid around Atlanta a good while, and things quieted 
down so that it seemed almost like peace, after the four months 
of continual fighting we had gone through. We had been 
under a strain so long that now we boys went in the other 
direction, and became too careless, and that's how we got picked 
up. We went out about five miles one night after a lot of nice 
smoked hams that a nigger told us were stored in an old cotton 
press, and which we knew would be enough sight better eating 
for Company C, than the commissary pork we had lived on so 
long. We found the cotton press, and the hams, just as the 
nigger told us, and we hitched up a team to take them into 
camp. As we hadn't seen any Johnny signs anywhere, we set 
our guns down to help load the meat, and just as we all came 
strinffino: out to th6 wafjon with as much meat as we could 
carry, a company of Ferguson's Cavalry popped out of the 
woods about one hundred yards in front of us and were on 
top of us before we could say ' scat.' You see they'd heard of 
the meat, too." 




ONB OF PKKOU.^'JiN'B CAYXUaX. 



CHAPTEE LYII. 

▲ FAIR 8ACEIFICE THE STORY OF ONE BOY WHO WTLLINGLT OAT* 

HIS YOUNG LIFE FOR HIS COUNTRY. 

Charley Barbour was one of the truest-hearted and best-liked 
of my school-boy chums and friends. For several terms we sat 
together on the same uncompromisingly uncomfortable bench, 
worried over the same boy-maddening problems in " Eay's 
Ai'ithmetic — Part III.," learned the same jargon of meaning- 
less rides from " Greene's Grammar," pondered over " Mitchell's 
Geography and Atlas," and tried in vain to understand why 
Providence made the surface of one State obtrusively pink and 
another ultramarine blue ; trod slowly and painfully over the 
rugged road " Bullion " points out for beginners in Latin, and 
began to believe we should hate ourselves and everybody else, 
if we were gotten up after the manner shown by "Cutter's 
Physiology." "We were caught together in the same long series 
of school-boy scrapes — and were usually f erruled together by 
the same strong-armed teacher. We shared nearly everything — 
our fun and work; enjoyment and annoj'-ance — all were 
generally meted out to us together. "We read from the same 
books the story of the wonderful world we were going to see in 
that bright future " when we were men ;" we spent our Satur- 
days and vacations in the miniature explorations of the rocky 
hills and caves, and dark cedar woods around our homes, to 
gather ocular helps to a better comprehension of that magical 
land which we were convinced began just beyond our horizon, 
and had in it, visible to the eye of him who traveled through 
its enchanted breadth, all that " Gulliver's Fables," the " Ara- 



A STOBT OF REBEL MILITARY PRISONS. 447 

bian Nights," and a hundred books of travel and adventure 
told of. 

We imagined that the only dull and commonplace spot on 
earth was that where we lived. Everywhere else life was a 
grand spectacular drama, full of thrilling effects. 

Brave and handsome young men were rescuing distressed 
damsels, beautiful as they were wealthy; bloody pirates and 
swarthy murderers were being foiled by quaint spoken back- 
woodsmen, who carried unerring rifles ; gallant but blundering 
Irishmen, spealdng the most delightful brogue, and maldng the 
funniest mistakes, were daily thwarting cool and determined 
villains ; bold tars were encountering fearful sea perils ; lion- 
hearted adventurers were cowing and quelling whole tribes of 
barbarians ; magicians were casting spells, misers hoarding 
gold, scientists making astonishing discoveries, poor and 
unknown boys achieving wealth and fame at a single bound, 
hidden mysteries coming to light, and so the world was going 
on, making reams of history with each diurnal revolution, and 
furnishing boundless material for the most delightful books. 

At the age of thirteen a perusal of the lives of Benjamin 
Franklin and Horace Greeley precipitated my determination 
to no^ longer hesitate in launching my small bark upon the 
great ocean. I ran away from home in a truly romantic way, 
and placed my foot on what I expected to be the first round of 
the ladder of fame, by becoming " devil boy " in a printing 
office in a distant large City. Charley's attachment to his 
mother and his home was too strong to permit him to take this 
step, and we parted in sorrow, mitigated on my side by roseate 
dreams of the future. 

Six years passed. One hot August morning I met an old 
acquaintance at the Creek, in Andersonville. He told me to 
come there the next morning, after roll-call, and he would take 
me to see some person who was very anxious to meet me. I 
was prompt at the rendezvous, and was soon joined by the 
other party. He threaded his way slowly for over haJf an 
hour through the closely-jumbled mass of tents and bmTOWS, 
and at length stopped in front of a blanket-tent in the north- 
western corner. The occupant rose and took my hand. For 



us 



AiJDEKSONVlLLE. 




an instant I was puzzled ; then the clear, blue eyes, and well- 
renjembered smile recalled to me my old-time comrade, Charley 

Barbour. His story 
was soon told. He 
was a Sergeant in 
a Western Yir- 
ginia cavalry regi- 
ment — the Fourth, 
I think. At the 
time Hunter was 
making his retreat 
from the Yalley of 
Virginia, it was de- 
cided to mislead 
the enemy by send- 
ing out a courier 
with false dis- 
patches to be cap- 
tured. There was 
a call for a volun- 
teer for this ser- 
vice. Charley was 
the first to offer, with that spirit of generous self-sacrifice that 
was one of his pleasantest traits when a boy. He knew what 
he had to exj)ect. Capture meant imprisonment at Anderson- 
ville ; our men had now a pretty clear understanding of what 
this was. Charley took the dispatches and rode into the enemy's 
lines. He was taken, and the false information produced the 
desired effect. On his way to Andersonville he was stripped 
of aU his clothing but his shirt and pantaloons, and turned into 
the Stockade in this condition. When I saw him he had been 
in a week or more. He told his story quietly — almost 
difiidently — not seeming aware that he had done more than 
his simple duty. I left him with the promise and expectation 
of returning the next day, but when I attempted to find him 
again, I was lost in the maze of tents and burrows. I had for- 
gotten to ask the number of his detachment, and after spending 
several days in hunting for him, I was forced to give the search 



THEN THE CLEAR BLtTE EYES AUT) WELL- 
KEMEMBERED SMILE. 



A STORY OF REBEL MILITARY PRISONS. 449 

up. He knew as little of my whereabouts, and though we wer« 
all the time within seventeen hundred feet of each other, neither 
we nor our common acquaintance could ever manage to meet 
again. This will give the reader an idea of the thvong com- 
pressed within the narrow limits of the Stockade. . After leaving 
Andersonville, however, I met this man once more, and learned 
from him that Charley had sickened and died within a monU 
after his entrance to prison. 

Sc ended his day-dream of a career in the busy world. 
20 



CHAPTEE LYIIL 

WH LEAVE SAVAJ^NAH MORE HOPES OF EXCHAITGE — SCENES AT 

DEPARTURE " FLANKERS " ON THE BACK TRACK TOWAKD 

ANDERSONVILLE ALARM THEREAT AT THE PARTINa- OF TWO 

WAYS WE FINALLY BRING UP AT CAMP LAWTON. 

On the evening of the 11th of October there came an order 
for one thousand prisoners to fall in and inarch out, for trans- 
fer to some other point. 

Of course, Andrews and I " flanked " into this crowd. That 
was our usual way of doing. Holding that the chances were 
strongly in favor of every movement of prisoners being to our 
hues, we never failed to be numbered in the first squad of pris- 
oners that were sent out. The seductive mirage of " exchange " 
was always luring us on. It must come some time, certainly, 
and it would be most likely to come to thosQ who were most 
earnestly searching for it. At all events, we should leave no 
means untried to avail ourselves of whatever seeming chances 
there might be. There could be no other motive for this move, 
we argued, than exchange. The Confederacy was not likely 
to be at the trouble and expense of hauling us about the coun- 
try without some good reason — something better than a wish 
to make us acquainted with Southern scenery and topography. 
It would hardly take us away from Savannah so soon after 
bringing us there for any other purpose than delivery to our 
people. 

The Eebels encouraged this belief with direct assertions of 
its truth. They framed a plausible lie about there having 
arisen some difficulty concerning the admission of our vessels 
past the harbor defenses of Savannah, which made it necessary 



A STOKY OF REBEL MILITABY PilI80N8. 451 

to take us elsewhere — probably to Charleston — for delivery 
to our men. 

Wishes are always the most powerful allies of belief. There 
is little difficulty in convincing a man of that of which he wants 
to be convinced. "We forgot the lie told us when we were 
taken from Anderson ville, and believed the one which was told 
us now. 

Andrews and I hastily snatched our worldly possessions — 
our overcoat, blanket, can, spoon, chessboard and men, yelled 
to some of our neighbors that they could have our hitherto 
much-treasured house, and running down to the gate, forced 
ourselves well up to the front of the crowd that was being 
assembled to go out. 

The usual scenes accompanying the departure of first squads 
were being acted tumultuously. Every one in the camp wanted 
to be one of the supposed-to-be-favored few, and if not selected 
at first, tried to "flank in" — that is, slip into the place of 
some one else who had had better luck. This one naturally 
resisted displacement, vi et armis, and the fights would become 
so general as to cause a resemblance to the famed Fair of Don- 
ny brook. The cry would go up — 

" Look out for flankers ! " 

The lines of the selected would dress up compactly, and out- 
siders trying to force themselves in would get mercilessly 
pounded. 

We finally got out of the pen, and into the cars, which soon 
rolled away to the westward. We were packed in too densely 
to be able to lie down. We could hardly sit down. Andrews 
and I took up our position in one corner, piled our httle trea- 
sures under us, and trying to lean against each other in such a 
way as to afford mutual support and rest, dozed fitfully through 
a long, weary night. 

When morning came we found ourselves running northwest 
through a poor, pine-barren country that strongly resembled 
that we had traversed in coming to Savannah. The more we 
looked at it the more familiar it became, and soon there was no 
doubt we were going back to Andersonyille. 

By noon we had reached Millen — eighty miles from Savan- 
nah, and fifty-three from Augusta. It was the junction of the 



452 AJSTDERSONVILLE. 

road leading to Macon and that running to Augusta. We 
halted a little while at the " Y," and to us the minutes were 
full of anxiety. If we turned off to the left we were going 
back to Andersonville. If we took the right hand road we 
were on the way to Charleston or Eichmond, with the chances 
m favor of exchange. 

At length we started, and, to our joy, our engine took the 
right hand track. We stopped again, after a run of five miles, 
in the midst of one of the open, scattering forests of long 
leaved pine that I have before described. We were ordered 
out of the cars, and marching a few rods, came in sight of 
another of those hateful Stockades, which seemed to be as 
natural products of the sterile sand of that dreary land as its 
desolate woods and its breed of boy murderers and gray-headed 
assassins. 

Again our hearts sank, and death seemed more welcome than 
incarceration in those gloomy wooden walls. We marched 
despondently up to the gates of the Prison, and halted while a 
party of Rebel clerks made a list of our names, rank, companies, 
and regiments. As they were Rebels it was slow work, Read- 
ing and writing never came by nature, as Dogberry would say, 
to any man fighting for Secession. As a rule, he took to them 
as reluctantly as if he thought them cunning inventions of the 
Northern Abolitionist to perplex and demoralize him. What a 
half-dozen boys taken out of our own ranks would have done 
with ease in an hour or so, these Rebels worried over all of the 
afternoon, and then their register of us was so imperfect, badly 
written and misspelled, that the Yankee clerks afterwards 
detailed for the purpose, never could succeed in reducing it to 
intelligibility. 

We learned that the place at which we had arrived was 
Camp Lawton, but we almost always spoke of it as " Millen," 
the same as Camp Sumter is universally known as Anderson- 
ville. 

Shortly after dark we were turned inside the Stockade. 
Being the first that had entered, there was quite a quantity of 
wood — the offal from the timber used in constructingf the 
stockade — lying on the ground. The night was chilly anr 
we soon had a number of fires blazing. Green pitch pine, whe^ 



▲ 8T0JBY OF REBEL MILITARY PRISONS. 



453 



burned, gives off a peculiar, pungent odor, which is never for- 
gotten by one who has once smelled it. I first became 
acquainted with it on entering Anderson ville, and to this day 
it is the most powerful remembrance I can have of the opening 
of that dreadful Iliad of woes. On my joui-ney to Washington 
of late years the locomotives are invariably fed with pitch 
pine as we near the Capital, and as the well-remembered smell 
reaches me, I grow sick at heart with the flood of saddening 
recollections indissolubly associated with it. 

As our fires blazed up the clinging, penetrating fumes dif- 
fused themselves everywhere. The night was as cool as the one 
when we arrived at Andersonville, the earth, meagerly sodded 
with sparse, hard, wiry grass, was the same ; the same piney 
breezes blew in from the surrounding trees, the same dismal 
owls hooted at us ; the same mournful whip-poor-will lamented, 
God knows what, in the gathering twilight. What we both 
felt in the gloomy recesses of downcast hearts Andrews 
expressed as he turned to me with : 

" My God, Mc, this looks like Andersonville aU over again." 

A cupful of corn meal was issued to each of us. I hunted up 

some water. Andrews made a stifi:' dough, and spread it about 

half an inch thick on the back of our chessboard. He propped 

this up before the fire, and when the surface was neatly browned 




" HE PEOPrED THIS TIP BEFOKE THE FIRE." 



over, slipped it off the board and turned it over to brown the 
other side similarly. This done, we divided it carefully between 
us, swallowed it in silence, spread our old overcoat on the ground, 
tucked chess-board, can, and spoon under far enough to be out 
of the reach of thieves, adjusted the thin blanket so as to get 



454 



AJSTDEKSONVILLK. 



the most possible warmth out of it, crawled in close together, 
and went to sleep. This, thank Heaven, we could do; we 
could still sleep, and Nature had some opportunity to repair 
the waste of the day. We slept, and forgot where we were. 




CHAPTER LIX 

OUB NEW QUAKTEES AT CAMP LAWTON — BUILDING A HUT — Alf 

EXCEPTIONAL COMMANDANT HE IS A GOOD MAN, BUT WILL TAKB 

BEIBE8 RATIONS. 

In the morning we took a survey of our new quarters, and 
found that we were in a Stockade resembling very much in 
construction and dimensions that at Anderson ville. The princi- 
pal difference was that the upright logs were in their rough 
state, whereas they were hewed at Anderson ville, and the brook 
running through the camp was not bordered by a swamp, but 
had clean, firm banks. 

Our next move was to make the best of the situation. "We 
were divided into hundreds, each commanded by a Sergeant. 
Ten hundreds constituted a division, the head of which was 
also a Sergeant. I was elected by my comrades to the Ser- 
geantcy of the Second Hundred of the First Division. As soon 
as we were assigned to our ground, we began constructing 
shelter. For the first and only time in my prison experience, 
we found a full supply of material for this purpose, and the use 
we made of it showed how infinitely better we would have 
fared if in each prison the Rebels had done even so slight a 
thing as to bring in a few logs from the surrounding woods and 
distribute them to us. A hundred or so of these would probably 
have saved thousands of lives at Andersonville and Florence. 

A large tree lay on the ground assigned to our hundred. 
Andrews and I took possession of one side of the ten feet 
nearest the butt. Other boys occupied the rest in a similar 
manner. One of our boys had succeeded in smuggling an ax in 
with him, and we kept it in constant use day and night, each 



466 ANDEBSONTILLK. 

group borrowing it for an hour or so at a time. It was as dull 
as a hoe, and we were very weak, so that it was slow work 
" niggering off " — (as the boys termed it) a cut of the log. It 
seemed as if beavers could have gnawed it off easier and more 
quickly. We only cut an inch or so at a time, and then passed 
the ax to the next users. Making little wedges with a dull 
knife, we drove them into the log with clubs, and split off long, 
thin strips, like the weatherboards of a house, and by the time 
we had split off our share of the log in this slow and laborious 
way, we had a fine lot of these strips. We Avere lucky enough 
to find four forked sticks, of which we made the corners of our 
dwelling, and roofed it carefully with our strips, held in place 
by sods torn up from the edge of the creek bank. The sides 
and ends were enclosed ; we gathered enough pine tops to cover 
the ground to a depth of several inches ; we banked up the 
outside, and ditched around it, and then had the most comfort- 
able abode we had during our ])rison career. It was truly a 
house builded with our own hands, for we had no tools what- 
ever save the occasional use of the aforementioned dull ax and 
equally dull knife. 

The rude little hut represented as much actual hard, manual 
labor as would be required to build a comfortable little cottage 
in the North, but we gladly performed it, as we would have 
done any other work to better our condition. 

For a while wood was quite plentiful, and we had the luxury 
daily of warm fires, which the increasing coolness of the weather 
made important accessories to our comfort. 

Other prisoners kept coming in. Those we left behind at 
Savannah followed us, and the prison there was broken up. 
Quite a number also came in from Anderson ville, so that in a 
little while we had between slx and seven thousand in the Stock- 
ade. The last comers found all the material for tents and all 
the fuel used up, and consequently did not fare so well as the 
earlier arrivals. 

The commandant of the prison — one Captain Bowes — was 
the best of his class it was my fortune to meet. Compared with 
the senseless brutality of Wirz, the reckless deviltry of Davis, 
or the stupid malignance of Barrett, at Florence, his adminis- 
tration was mildness and wisdom itself. 



A S'lDUy OF REBEL MILITARY PRISONS. 



457 



ITo enforced (lisci]iline better than any of those named, but 
had what they all lacked — executive ability — and he secured 
results that they could not possibly attain, and without any- 
thing hke the friction that attended thieir eilorts. I do no*i 




A HOUSE BirrLDED wnn our own hands. 



remember that any one was shot during our six weeks' stay at 
Millen — a circumstance simply remarkable, since I do not 
recall a single week passed anywhere else without at least one 
murder by the guards. 

One instance will illustrate the difference of his administra- 
tion from that of other prison commandants. He came upon 
the grounds of our division one morning, accompanied by a 
pleasant-faced, intelligent-appearing lad of about fifteen or 
sixteen. lie said to us : 

" Gentlemen : (The only instance during our imprisonment 
when we received so polite a designation.) This is my son, who 



458 ANDERSONVILLE. 

will hereafter call 3^our roll, lie will treat you as gentlemen, 
and I know you will do the same to him." 

This understanding was observed to the letter on both sides. 
Young Bowes invariably spoke civilly to us, and we obeyed his 
orders with a prompt cheerfulness that left him nothing to 
complain of. 

The only charge I have to make against Bowes is^ade more 
in detail in another chapter, and that is, that he took money 
from well prisoners for giving them the first chance to go 
through on the Sick Exchange. How culpable this was I must 
leave each reader to decide for himself. I thought it very 
wrong at the time, but possibly my views might have been 
colored highly by ray not having any money wherewith to 
procure my own inclusion in the happy lot of the exchanged. 

Of one thing I am certain: that his acceptance of money to 
bias his official action was not singular on his part. I am con- 
vinced that every commandant we had over us — except TVirz 
— was habitually in the receipt of bribes from prisoners. I 
never heard that any one succeeded in bribing Wirz, and this is 
the sole good thing I can say of that fellow. Against this it 
may be said, however, that he plundered the boys so effectually 
on entermg the prison as to leave them little of the where- 
tvithal to bribe anybody. 

Davis was probably the most unscrupulous bribe-taker of the 
lot. He actually received money for permitting prisoners to 
escape to our lines, and got down to as low a figure' as one hun- 
dred dollars for this sort of service. I never heard that any of 
the other commandants went this far. 

The rations issued to us were somewhat better than those of 
Anderson ville, as the meal was finer and better, though it was 
absurdedly insufficient in quantity, and we received no salt. On 
several occasions fresh beef was dealt out to us, and each time 
the excitement created among those who had not tasted fresh 
meat for weeks and months was wonderful. On the first occa- 
sion the meat was simply the heads of the cattle killed for the 
use of the guards. Several wagon loads of these were brought 
in and distributed. We broke them up so that every man got 
a piece of the bone, which was boiled and reboiled, as long as 
a single bubble of grease would rise to the surface of the water ; 



A STOET OF REBEL MILITAET PRIS0N8. 



459 



every vestige of meat was gnawed and scraped from the surface* 
and then the bone was charred until it crumbled, when it was 
eaten. No one who has not experienced it can imagine the inor- 
dinate hunger for animal food of those who had eaten little else 




.,^^,^^.^^'''^4&.i^ 



OUR FIRST MEAT. 



than corn bread for so long. Our exhausted bodies were perish- 
ing for lack of proper sustenance. Nature indicated fresh beef 
as the best medium to repair the great damage already done, 
and our longing for it became beyond description. 



CHAPTER LX- 

THK RAIDERS RE-APPEAE ON THE SCENE THE ATTEMPT TO ASSASSIN- 
ATE THOSE WHO WERE CONCERNED m THE EXECUTION A CODPLB 

OF LIVELY FIGHTS, IN WHICH THE RAIDERS ARE DEFEATED HOLD- 
ING AN ELECTION. 

Our old antagonists — the Eaiders — were present in strong 
force in Millen. Like ourselves, they had imagined the 
departure from Andersonville was for exchange, and their 
relations to the Rebels were such that they were all given a 
chance to go with the first squads. A number had been allowed 
to go with the sailors on the Special Kaval Exchange from 
Savannah, in the place of sailors and marines who had died. 
On the way to Charleston a fight had taken place between 
them and the real sailors, during which one of their number — a 
curly-headed Irishman named Dailey, who was in such high 
favor with the Rebels that he was given the place of driving 
the ration wagon that came in the Korth Side at Anderson- 
ville — was killed, and thrown under the wheels of the movins: 
train, which passed over him. 

After things began to settle into shape at Millen, they seemed 
to believe that they were in such ascendancy as to numbers and 
organization that they could put into execution their schemes 
of vengeance against those of us who had been active partici- 
pants in the execution of their confederates at Andersonville. 

After some little preliminaries they settled upon Corporal 
"Wat" Payne, of m}' company, as their first victim. The 
reader will remember Payne as one of the two Corporals who 
pulled the trigger to the scaffold at the time of the execution. 

Payne was a very good man physically, and was yet in fair 



A. BTOEY OF REBEL MILITABT PBI80N8. 461 

condition. The Raiders came up one day Trith their best man 
— Pete Donnelly — and provoked a fight, intending, in the 
course of it, to kill Payne. We, who knew Payne, felt reason- 
ably confident of his ability to handle even so redoubtable a 
pugilist as Donnelly, and we gathered together a little squad of 
our friends to see fair play. 

The fight began after the usual amount of bad talk on both 
sides, and we were pleased to see our man slowly get tlie better 
of the New York plug-ugly. After several sharp rounds they 
closed, and still Payne was ahead, but in an evil moment he 
spied a pine knot at his feet, which he thought he could reach, 
and end the fight by cracking Donnelly's head with it. 
Donnelly took instant advantage of the movement to get it, 
threw Payne heavily, and fell upon him. His crowd rushed in 
to finish our man by clubbing him over the head. We sailed 
in to prevent this, and after a rattling exchange of blows all 
around, succeeded in getting Payne away. 

The issue of the fight seemed rather against us, however, and 
the Raiders were much emboldened. Payne kept close to his 
crowd after that, and as we had shoAvn such an entire willing- 
ness to stand by him, the Raiders — with their accustomed pru- 
dence when real fighting was involved — did not attempt to 
molest him farther, though they talked very savagely. 

A few days after this Sergeant Goody and Corporal Ned 
Carrigan, both of our battalion, came in. I must ask the 
reader to again recall the fact that Sergeant Goody was one of 
the six hangmen who put the meal-sacks over the heads, and the 
ropes around the necks of the condemned. Corporal Carrigan 
was the gigantic prize fighter, who was universally acknowledged 
to be the best man physically among the whole thirty-four 
thousand in Andersonville. The Raiders knew that Goody had 
come in before we of his own battalion did. They resolved 
to kill him then and there, and in broad daylight. He had 
secured in some way a shelter tent, and was inside of it fixing it 
up. The Raider crowd, headed by Pete Donnelly and Dick 
Allen, went up to his tent and one of them caUed to him : 

" Sergeant, come out ; I want to see you." 

Goody, supposing it was one of us, came crawling out on his 
hands and knees. As he did so their heavy clubs crashed down 



462 ANDERSON VILLK. 

upon his head. He was neither killed nor stunned, as they had 
reason to expect. He succeeded in rising to his feet, and break- 
ing through the crowd of assassins. He dashed down the side 
of the hill, hotly pursued by them. Coming to the Creek, he 
leaped it in his excitement, but his pursuers could not, and were 
checked. One of our battalion boys, who saw and compre^ 
hended the whole affair, ran over to us, shouting : 

" Turn out ! turn out, for God's sake 1 the Raiders are killing 
Goody ! " 

We snatched up our clubs and started after the Raiders, 
but before we could reach them, Ned Carrigan, who also compre- 
hended what the trouble was, had run to the side of Goody, 
armed with a terrible looking club. The sight of Ked, and the 
demonstration that he was thoroughly aroused, was enough for 
the Raider crew, and they abandoned the field hastily. "We 
did not feel ourselves strong enough to follow them on to their 
own dung hill, and try conclusions with them, but we deter- 
mined to report the matter to the Rebel Commandant, from 
whom we had reason to believe we could expect assistance. 
We were right. He sent in a squad of guards, arrested Dick 
Allen, Pete Donnelly, and several other ringleaders, took them 
out and put them in the stocks in such a manner that they 
were compelled to lie upon their stomachs. A shallow tin 
vessel containing water was placed under their faces to furnish 
them drink. 

They staid there a day and night, and when released, joined 
the Rebel Army, entering the artillery company that manned 
the guns in the fort covering the prison. I used to imagine 
with what zeal they would send us over a round of shell or 
grape if they could get anything Hke an excuse. 

This gave us good riddance of our dangerous enemies, and 
we had httle further trouble with any of them. 

* * 

The depression in the temperature made me very sensible of 
the deficiencies in my wardrobe. Unshod feet, a shirt like a 
fishing net, and pantaloons as well ventilated as a paling fence 
might do very well for the broihng sun at Andersonville and 
Savannah, but now, with the thermometer nightly dipping a 
little nearer the frost line, it became unpleasantly evident that 



A 8T0KT OF REBEL MILITABY PKISON8. 



463 



as garments their office was purely perfunctory ; one migh.t 
say ornamental simply, if he wanted to be very sarcastic. They 
were worn solely to afford convenient quarters for multitudes 
of lice, and in deference to the prejudice which has existed since 
the Fall of Man against our mingling with our fellow creatures 
in the attire provided us by Nature. Had I read Darwin then 
I should have expected that my long exposure to the weather 
would start a fine suit of fur, in the effort of Nature to adapt 
me to my environment. But no more indications of this 
appeared than if I had been a hairless dog of Mexico, suddenly 
transplanted to more northern latitudes. Providence did not 
seem to be in the tempering-the-wind-to-the-shorn-lamb business, 
as far as I was concerned. I still retained an almost unconquer- 
able prejudice against stripping the dead to secure clothes, and so 
unless exchange or death came speedily, I was in a bad fix. 

One morning about day break, Andrews, who had started to 
go to another part of the camp, came slipping back in a state 

of gleeful excite- 
ment. At first I 
thought he either 
had found a tunnel 
or had heard some 
good news about 
exchange. It was 
neither. He opened 
his jacket and hand- 
ed me an infantry- 
man's blouse, which 
he had found in the 
main street, where 
it had dropped out 
of some fellow's 
bundle. We did 
not make any extra 
exertion to find the 
owner. Andrews 



A LUCKY FIND. 

was in sore need of clothes himself, but my necessities were 
so much greater that the generous fellow thought of my wants 
first. We examined the garment with as much interest as ever 




4^ ANDERSONVILLK. 

a belle bestowed on a new dress from Worth's. It was in fair 
preservation, but the owner had cut the buttons off to trade to 
the guard, doubtless for a few sticks of wood, or a spoonful of 
salt. We supplied the place of these with little wooden pins, 
and I donned the garment as a shirt and coat — and vest, too, for 
that matter. The best suit I ever put on never gave me a 
hundredth part the satisfaction that this did. Shortly after, I 
managed to subdue my aversion so far as to take a good shoe 
which a one-legged dead man had no farther use for, and a 
httle later a comrade gave me for the other foot a boot bottom 
from which he had cut the top to make a bucket. 

The day of the Presidential election of 186-i approached. 
The Rebels were naturally very much interested in the result, 
as they believed that the election of McClellan meant compro- 
mise and cessation of hostilities, while the re-election of Lincoln 
me; ait prosecution of the War to the bitter end. The toady- 
ing Raiders, who w^ere perpetually hanging around the gate to 
get a chance to insinuate themselves into the favor of the Rebel 
officers, persuaded them that we were all so bitterly hostile to 
our Government for not exchanging us that if we were allowed 
to vote we would cast an overwhelming majority in favor of 
McClellan. 

The Rebels thought that this might perhaps be used to advan- 
tage as political capital for their friends in the North. They 
gave orders' that we might, if we chose, hold an election on the 
same day of the Presidential election. They sent in some 
ballot boxes, and w^e elected Judges of the Election. 

About noon of that day Captain Bowes, and a crowd of 
tight-booted, broad-hatted Rebel officers, strutted in with the 
peculiar " Ef - yer-don't-b'lieve - I'm-a-butcher - jest-smell - o'-me- 
butes " swagger characteristic of the class. They had come is 
to see us all voting for McClellan. Instead, they found the 
polls surrounded with ticket pedlers shouting : 

" Walk right up here now, and get your Unconditional- 
Union-Abraham Lmcoln tickets !" 

" Here's your straight-haired prosecution-of-the-war ticket." 

" Vote the Lincoln ticket ; vote to whip the Rebels, and 
make peace with them when they've laid down their arms." 



A STOET OF KEBEL MILITiLRY PBI80N8. 465 

" Don't vote a McClellan ticket and gratify Rebels, 

everywhere," etc. 

The Eebel officers did not find the scene what their fancy 
painted it, and turning around they strutted out. 

When the votes came to be counted out there were over seven 
thousand for Lincoln, and not half that many hundred for 
McClellan. The latter got very few votes outside the Raider 
crowd. The same day a similar election was held in Florence, 
with like result. Of course this did not indicate that there was 
any such a preponderance of Republicans among us. It meant 
simply that the Democratic boys, little as they might have liked 
Lincoln, would have voted for him a hundred times rather 
than do anything to please the Rebels 

I never heard that the Rebels sent the result North, 



CHAPTER LXL 

THB REBELS FORiTALLY PEOPOSE TO TJS TO DESERT TO THRM — 

OONTITMELIOUa TREATMENT OP THE PROPOSITION THEIB BAOB 

AN EXCITINO TIME AN OUTBREAK THREATENED DEFFIOUL- 

TIES ATTENDINQ DESERTION TO THE REBELS. 

One day in J^ovember, some little time after the occurrences 
narrated in the last chapter, orders came in to make out rolls 
of all those who were born outside of the United States, and 
whose terms of service had expired. 

'We held a little council among ourselves as to the meaning 
of this, and concluded that some partial exchange had been 
agreed on, and the Rebels were going to send back the class of 
boys whom they thought would bo of least value to the Govern- 
ment. Acting on this conclusion the great majority of us 
enrolled ourselves as foreigners, and as having served out 
our terms. I made out the roll of my hundred, and managed 
to give every man a foreign nativity. Those whose names 
would bear it were assigned to England, Ireland, Scotland^ 
France and Germany, and the balance were distributed through 
Canada and the "West Indies. After finishing the roll and 
sending it out, I did not wonder that the Rebels believed the 
battles for the Union were fought by foreign mercenaries. The 
other roUs were made out in the same way, and I do not sup- 
pose that they showed five hundred native Americans in the 
Stockade. 

The next day after sending out the rolls, there came an order 
that all those whose names appeared thereon should fall in. 
We did so, promptly, and as nearly every man in camp was 
included, ^^e fell in as for other purposes, by hundreds and 



A STORY OF EKBEL MILITABY PKISONB. 467 

thousands. We were then marched outside, and massed around 
a stump on which stood a Rebel officer, evidently waiting to 
make us a speech. We awaited his remarks with the greatest 
impatience, but he did not begin until the last division had 
marched out and came to a parade rest close to the stump. 

It was the same old story : 

"Prisoners, you can no longer have any doubt that your 
Government has cruelly abandoned you ; it makes no efTorts to 
release you, and refuses all our offers of exchange. We are 
anxious to get our men back, and have made every effort to do 
so, but it refuses to meet us on any reasonable grounds. Tour 
Secretary of War has said that the Government can get along 
very well without you, and General Halleck has said that you 
were nothing but a set of blackberry pickers and coffee boilers? 
anyhow. 

" You've already endured much more than it could expect of 
you ; you served it faithfully during the term you enlisted for, 
and now, when it is through with you, it throws you aside to 
starve and die. You also can have no doubt that the Southern 
Confederacy is certain to succeed in securing its independence. 
It will do this in a few months. It now offers you an oppor- 
tunity to join its service, and if you serve it faithfully to the 
end, you wiU receive the same rewards as the rest of its soldiers. 
You will be taken out of here, be well clothed and fed, given a 
good bounty, and, at the conclusion of the War receive a land 
warrant for a nice farm. If you" 

But we had heard enough. The Sergeant of our division — 
a man with a stentorian voice — sprang out and shouted: 

" Attention, First Division I " 

We Sergeants of hundreds repeated the command down the 
line. Shouted he : 

"First Division, about'''' — 

Said we : 

"First Hundred, ahout — " 

" Second Hundred, ahont — " 

" Thu-d Hundred, dbmit — " 

"Fourth Hundred, about — " etc., eta 

Said he — 

"FaceI 1" 



4:68 Ain)EE80NVILLE. 

Ten Sergeants repeated " Face ! " one after the other, and each 
man in the hundreds turned on his heel. Then our leader com- 
manded — 

" First Division, forward ! maech ! " 
and we strode back into the Stockade, followed immediately by 
all the other divisions, leaving the orator still standing on the 
stump. 

The Rebels were furious at this curt way of replying. "We 
had scarcely reached our quarters when they came in with 
several companies, with loaded guns and fixed bayonets. They 
drove us out of our tents and huts, into one corner, under the pre- 
tense of hunting axes and spades, but in reality to steal our 
blankets, and whatever else they could find that they wanted, 
and to break down and injure our huts, many of which, costing 
us days of patient labor, they destroyed in pure wantonness. 

We were burning with the bitterest indignation. A tall 
slender man named Lloyd, a member of the Sixty-First Ohio — a 
rough, uneducated fellow, but brim fuU of patriotism and manly 
common sense, jumped up on a stump and poured out his soul 
in rude but fiery eloquence : " Comrades," he said, " do not let 
the blowing of these Rebel whelps discourage you; pay no 
attention to the lies they have told you to-day ; you know well 
that our Government is too honorable and just to desert any 
one who serves it; it has Twt deserted us; their hell-born Con- 
federacy is not going to succeed. I tell you tliat as sure as 
there is a God who reigns and judges in Israel, before the 
Spring breezes stir the tops of these blasted old pines their 

Confederacy and all the lousy graybacks who support it 

wiU be so deep in hell that nothing but a search warrant from 
the throne of God Almighty can ever find it again. And the 
glorious old Stars and Stripes — " 

Here we began cheering tremendously. A Rebel Captain 
came running up, said to the guard, who was leaning on his 
gun, gazing curiously at Lloyd : 

"What in are you standing gaping there for? Why 

don't you shoot the Yankee son ? " and 

snatching the gun away from him, cocked and leveled it at 
Lloyd, but the boys near jerked the speaker down from the 
stump and saved his life. 



A 8T0KY OF BKBEL MILITABT PRISONS. 469 

We became fearfully wrought up. Some of the more excit- 
able shouted out to charge oa the line of guards, snatch their 
guns away from them, and force our way through the gates. 
The shouts were taken up by others, and, as if in obedience to 
the suggestion, we instinctively formed in line-of-battle facing 
the guards. A glance down the line showed me an array of 
desperate, tensely drawn faces, such as one sees who looks at 
men when they are summoning up all their resolution for some 
deed of great peril. The Rebel officers hastily retreated behind 
the line of guards, whose faces blanched, but they leveled their 
muskets and prepared to receive us. 

Captain Bowes, who was overlooking the prison from an eleva- 
tion outside, had, however, divined the trouble at the outset, and 
was preparing to meet it. The gunners, who had shotted their 
pieces and trained them upon us when we came out to listen to 
the speech, had again covered us with them, and were ready to 
sweep the prison with grape and canister at the instant of 
command. Tiie long roll was summonmg the infantry regi- 
ments back into line, and some of the cooler-headed among us 
pointed these facts out and succeeded in getting the line to 
dissolve again into groups of muttering, sullen-faced men. 
When this was done, the guards marched out, by a cautious, 
indirect manuver, so as not to turn their backs to us. 

It was believed that we had some among us who would like 
to avail themselves of the offer of the Eebels, and that they would 
try to inform the Rebels of their desires by going to the gate 
during the night and speaking to the Officer-of-the-Guard. A 
squad armed themselves with clubs and laid in wait for these. 
They succeeded in catching several — snatching some of them 
back even after they had told the guard their wishes in a tone so 
loud that all near could hear distinctly. The Officer-of-the-Guard 
rushed in two or three times in a vain attempt to save the would- 
be deserter from the cruel hands that clutched him and bore him 
away to where he had a lesson in loyalty impressed upon the 
fleshiest part of his person by a long, flexible strip of pme, 
wielded by very calling hands. 

After this was kept up for several nights different ideas began 
to prevail. It was felt that if a man wanted to join the Rebels, the 
best way was to let him go and get rid of him. lie was of no 



470 AJTDERSONVILLB. 

benefit to the Government, and would be of none to the Rebels. 
After this no restriction was put upon any one who desired to 
go outside and take the oath. But very few did so, however, 
and these were wholly confined to the Raider crowd. 



CHAPTER LXIL 

8EEGEANT LEROT L. KEY HIS ADVENTUKE8 SUBSEQUENT TO THH 

EXECUTION HE GOES OUTSmE AT ANDERSONVILLE ON PAKOLI 

— LABOIiSm THE COOK-HOUSE ATTEMPTS TO ESCAPE IS KEOAP- 

TUKED AND TAKEN TO MACON ESCAPES FROM THERE, BUT IB 

COMPELLED TO RETURN — IS FINALLY EXCHANGED AT SAVANNAH. 

Leroy L. Key, the heroic Sergeant of Company M, Sixteenth 
Dlinois Cavalry, who organized and led the Regulators at 
Andersonville in their successful conflict with and defeat of the 
Raiders, and who presided at the execution of the six con- 
demned men on the 11th of July, furnishes, at the request ol 
the author, the following story of his prison career subsequent 
to that event : 

On the 12th day of July, 1SG4, the day after the hanging of 
the six Raiders, by the urgent request of my many friends (of 
whom you were one), I sought and obtained from Wirz a parole 
for myself and the six brave men who assisted as executioners 
of those desperados. It seemed that you were aU fearful that 
we might, after what had been done, be assassinated if we 
remained in the Stockade ; and that we might be overpowered) 
perhaps, by the friends of the Raiders we had hanged, at a 
time possibly, when you would not be on hand to give us 
assistance, and thus lose our lives for rendering the help we 
did in getting rid of the worst pestilence we had to contend 
with. 

On obtaining my parole I was very careful to have it so 
arranged and mutually understood, between Wirz and myself, 
that at any time that my squad (meaning the survivors of my 
comrades, with whom I was originally captured) was sent away 



472 



A2TDEBS0NVILLB. 



from Andersonville, either to be exchanged or to go to another 
prison, that I should be allowed to go with them. This was 
agreed to, and so written in my parole which I carried untQ it 
absolutely wore out. I took a position in the cook-house, and 
the other boys either went to work there, or at the hospital or 





BEEGEANT L. L. KEY. 



grave-yard as occasion required. I worked here, and did the 
best I could for the many starving wretches inside, in the way 
of preparing their food, until the eighth day of September, at 
which time, if you remember, quite a train load of men were 
removed, as many of us thought, for the purpose of exchange ; 
but, as we afterwards discovered, to be taken to another prison. 
Among the crowd so removed was my squad, or, at least, a por- 
tion of them, being my intimate mess-mates while in the Stock- 
ade. As soon as I found this to be the case I waited on "VVirz 
at his oflBce, and asked permission to go with them, which he 



A 8T0ET OF EEBEL MILITARY PKIS0N8. 



473 



refused, stating that he was compelled to have men at the cook- 
house to cook for those in the Stockade until they were all gone 
or exchanged. I reminded him of the condition in my parole, 
but this only had the effect of making him mad, and he threat- 
ened me with the stocks if I did not go back and resume work. 
I then and there made up my mind to attempt my escape, con- 
sidering that the parole had first been broken by the man that 
granted it. 

On inquiry after my return to the cook-house, I found four 
other boys who were also planning an escape, and who were 
only too glad to get me to join them and 
take charge of the affair. Our plans were 
well laid and well executed, as the sequel 
V, ill prove, and in this particular my own 
experience in the endeavor to escape from 
AndersonviUe is not entirely dissimilar from 
yours, though it had different results. I very 
much legiet that in the attempt I lost my 
penciled memorandum, in which it was my 
habit to chronicle what went on around me 
r, and where I had the names of my brave 




, ^mrm^ 







WK FOUND OURSELVES IN THE DENSEST PINE FOREST I EVKB 8A.W. 

comrades who made the effort to escape with me. Unfortu 
nately, I cannot now recall to memory the name of one of them 
or remember to what commands they belonged. 

I knew that our greatest risk was run in eluding the guards, 



474 AITOEESONVILLE. 

and that in the morning we should be compelled to cheat the 
blood-hounds. The first we managed to do very well, not 
without many hairbreadth escapes, however; but we did suc- 
ceed in getting through both lines of guards, and found our- 
selves in the densest pine forest I ever saw. "We traveled, as 
nearly as we could judge, due north all night until daylight. From 
our fatigue and bruises, and the long hours that had elapsed 
since 8 o'clock, the time of our startmg, we thought we had 
come not less than twelve or fifteen miles. Imagine our sur- 
prise and mortification, then, when we could plainly hear the 
reveille, and almost the Sergeant's voice calling the roll, while 
the answers of " Here 1 " were perfectly distinct. We could 
not possibly have been more than a mile, or a mile-and-a-half 
at the farthest, from the Stockade. 

Our anxiety and mortification were doubled when at the 
usual hour — as we supposed — we heard the well-known and 
long-familiar sound of the hunter's horn, calling his hounds to 
their accustomed task of making the circuit of the Stockade, for 
the purpose of ascertaining whether or not any " Yankee " had 
had the audacity to attempt an escape. The hounds, anticipating, 
no doubt, this usual daily work, gave forth glad barks of joy at 
being thus called forth to duty. We heard them start, as was 
usual, from about the railroad depot (as we imagined), but the 
sounds growing fainter and fainter gave us a little hope that 
our trail had been missed. Only a short time, however, were 
we allowed this pleasant reflection, for ere long — it could not 
have been more than an hour — we could plainly see that they 
were drawing nearer and nearer. They finally appeared so close 
that I advised the boys to climb a tree or sapling in order to 
keep the dogs from biting them, and to be ready to surrender 
when the hunters came up, hoping thus to experience as little 
misery as possible, and not dreaming but that we were caught. 
On, on came the hounds, nearer and nearer still, till we imagined 
that we could see the undergrowth in the forest shaking by 
coming in contact with their bodies. Plainer and plainer came 
the sound of the hunter's voice urging them forward. Our hearts 
were in our throats, and in the terrible excitement we wondered if 
it could be possible for Providence to so arrange it that the dogs 
would pass us. This last thought, by some strange fancy, had 



A BTOET OF EEBEL MILITAET PRISONS. 



475 



taken possession of me, and I here frankly acknowledge that I 
believed it would happen. Why I believed it, God only knows. 
My excitement was so great, indeed, that I almost lost sight of 




THE DOGS CAME WITUra NOT LESS THAN THREE HUNDRED YARDS OF US. 



our danger, and felt like shouting to the dogs myself, while J 
came near losing my hold on the tree in which I was hidden. 
By chance I happened to look around at my nearest neighbor 
in distress. His expression wa? sufficient to quell any enthusiasm 1 
might have had, and I, too, became despondent. In a very few 
minutes our suspense was over. The dogs came within not less 
than three hundred yards of us, and we could even see one of 
them. God in Heaven can only imagine what great joy was 
then brought to our aching hearts, for almost instantly upon 
coming into sight, the hounds struck ofif on a different trail, and 
passed us. Their voices became fainter and fainter, until finally 
we could hear them no longer. About noon, however, they 



476 AITDEBSONVILLK. 

were called back and taken to camp, but until that time not 
one of us left our position in the trees. 

"When we Avere satisfied that we were safe for the present, we 
descended to the ground to get what rest we could, in order to 
be prepared for the night's march, having previously agreed to 
travel at night and sleep in the day time. " Our Father, who 
art in Heaven," etc., were the first words that escaped my lips, 
and the first thoughts that came to my mind as I landed on 
terra firma. l^ever before, or since, had I experienced such a 
profound reverence for Almighty God, for I firmly believe that 
only through some mighty invisible power were we at that 
time delivered from untold tortures. Had we been found, we 
might have been torn and mutilated by the dogs, or, talven 
back to Andersonville, have suffered for days or perhaps weeks 
in the stocks or chain gang, as the humor of "Wirz might have 
dictated at tlic time — either of which would have been almost 
certain death. 

It was very fortunate for us that before our escape from 
Andersonville we were detailed at the cook-house, for by this 
means we were enabled to bring away enough food to live for 
several days without the necessity of theft. Each one of us 
had our haversacks full of such small ddicacies as it was pos- 
sible for us to get when we started, these consisting of corn 
bread and fat bacon — nothing less, nothing more. Yet we 
managed to subsist comfortably until our fourth day out, when 
"we happened to come upon a sweet potato patch, the potatos in 
which had not been dag. In a very short space of time we 
were all well supplied with this article, and lived on them raw 
during that day and the next night. 

Just at evening, in going through a field, we suddenly came 
across three negro men, who at first sight of us showed signs of 
running, thinking, as they told us afterward, that we were the 
"patrols." After explaining to them who we were and our con- 
dition, they took us to a very quiet retreat in the woods, and 
two of them went off, stating that they would soon be back. In 
a very short time they returned laden with well cooked provis- 
ions, which not only gave us a good supper, but supplied us for 
the next day with aU that we wanted. They then guided ua 



A 8T0KY OK REBEL MILITAKY FRISONS- 477 

on our way for several miles, and left us, after having refused 
compensation for what they had done. 

We continued to travel in this way for nine long weary 
nights, and on the morning of the tenth day, as we were going 
into the woods to hide as usual, a little before daylight, we came 
to a small pond at which there was a negro boy watering two 
mules before hitching them to a cane mill, it then being cane 
grinding time in Georgia. lie saw us at the same time we did 
him, and being frightened put whip to the animals and ran off. 
"We tried every way to stop him, but it was no use. He had 
the start of us. We were very fearful of the consequences of 
this mishap, but had no remedy, and being very tired, could do 
nothing else but go into the woods, go to sleep and trust to 
luck. 

The next thing I remembered was being punched in the ribs 
by my^omrade nearest to me, and aroused with the remark, 
" We are gone up." On opening my eyes, I saw four men, in 
citizens' dress, each of whom had a shot gun ready for use. We 
were ordered to get up. The first question asked us was : 

"Who are you?" 

This was spoken in so mild a tone as to lead me to believe 
that we might possibly be in the hands of gentlemen, if not 
indeed in those of friends. It was some time before any one 
answered. The boys, by their looks and the expression of their 
countenances, seemed to appeal to me for a reply to get them 
out of their present dilemma, if possible. Before I had time to 
collect my thoughts, we were startled by these words, coming 
from the same man that had asked the original question : 

" You had better not hesitate, for we have an idea who you 
are, and should it prove that we are correct, it wiU be the worse 
for you." 

" ' Who do you think we are ? ' I inquired. 

" ' Horse thieves and moss-backs,' was the reply. 

I jumped at the conclusion instantly that in order to save 
our Uves, we had better at once own the truth. In a very few 
words I told them who we were, where we were from, how 
long we had been on the road, etc. At this they withdrew a 
short distance from us for consultation, leaving us for the time 
in terrible suspense as to what our fate might be. Soon, how- 



478 ANDEKSONVILLl!. 

ever, they returned and informed us that they Tvould be com- 
pelled to take us to the County Jail, to await further orders 
from the Military Commander of the District, While they 
were talking together, I took a hasty inventory of what valua- 
bles we had on hand, I found in the crowd four silver watches, 
about three hundred dollars in Confederate money, and possibly 
about one hundred dollars in greenbacks. Before their return, I 
told the boys to be sure not to refuse any request I should make. 
Said I : 

" ' Gentlemen, we have here four silver watches and several 
hundred dollars in Confederate money and greenbacks, all of 
which we now offer you, if you will but allow us to proceed on 
our journey, we taking our own claances in the future," 

This proposition, to my great surprise, was refused. I thought 
then that possibly I had been a little indiscreet in exposing our 
valuables, but in this I was mistaken, for we had, indeed, fallen 
into the hands of gentlemen, whose zeal for the Lost Cause was 
greater than that for obtaining worldly wealth, and who not 
only refused the bribe, but took us to a well-furnished and weU- 
supplied farm house close by, gave us an excellent breakfast, 
allowing us to sit at the table in a beautiful dining-room, with 
a lady at the head, filled our haversacks with good, wholesome 
food, and allowed us to keep our property, with an admonition 
to be careful how we showed it again. We were then put into 
a wagon and taken to Hamilton, a small town, the county seat 
of Hamilton County, Georgia, and placed in jail, where we 
remained for two days and nights — fearing, always, that the 
jaU would be burned over our heads, as we heard frequent 
threats of that natui'e, by the mob on the streets. But the 
same kind Providence that had heretofore watched over us, 
seemed not to have deserted us in this trouble. 

One of the days we were confined at this place was Sunday, 
and some kind-hearted lady or ladies (I only wish I knew their 
names, as well as those of the gentlemen who had us first in 
charge, so that I could chronicle them with honor here) taking 
compassion upon our forlorn condition, sent us a splendid 
dinner on a very large china platter. Wliether it was done 
intentionally or not, we never learned, but it was a fact, how- 
ever, that there was not a knife, fork or spoon upon the dish, 



A 6TOKY OF REBEL MILITABT PBIS0N8. 479 

and no table to set it npon. It was placed on the floor, around 
which we soon gathered, and, with grateful hearts, we "got 
away " with it all, in an incredibly short space of time, while 
many men and boys looked on, enjoying our ludicrous attitudes 
and manners. 

From here we were taken to Columbus, Ga., and again 
placed in jail, and in the charge of Confederate soldiers. We 
could easily see that we were gradually getting into hot water 
again, and that, ere many days, we Avould have to resume our 
old habits in prison. Our only hope now was that we would 
not be returned to Andersonville, knowing well that if we got 
back into the clutches of Wirz our chances for life would be 
slim indeed. From Columbus we were sent by rail to Macon, 
where wo were placed in a prison somewhat similar to Ander- 
sonville, but of nothing like its pretensions to security. I soon 
learned tliat it was only used as a kind of reception place for 
the prisoners who were captured in small squads, and when 
they numbered two or three hundred, they would be 
shipped to Andersonville, or some other place of greater dimen- 
sions and strength. What became of the other boys who were 
with me, after we got to Macon, I do not know, for I lost sight 
of ihem til ere. The very next day after our arrival, there 
were shipped to Andersonville from this prison between two 
and three hundred men. I was called on to go with 
the crowd, but having had a sufficient experience of the hos- 
pitality of that hotel, I concluded to play " old soldier," so I 
became too sick to travel. In this way I escaped being sent oil 
four different times. 

Meanwhile, quite a large number of commissioned ofScers 
had been sent up from Charleston to be exchanged at Rough 
and Ready. With them were about forty more than the cartel 
called for, and they were left at Macon for ten days or two 
weeks. Among these officers were several of my acquaintance, 
one being Lieut. Iluntly of our regiment (I am not quite sure 
that I am right in the name of this officer, but I think I am), 
through whose influence I was allowed to go outside with them 
on parole. It was while enjoying tliis parole that I got more 

fn-mib'arly acquainted with Captain Hurtell, or Hurtrell, 

who was in command of the prison at Macon, and to his honor, 



480 ANDERSONVILLB. 

I here assert, that he was the only gentleman and the only 
officer that had the least humane feeling in his breast, who ever 
had charge of me while a prisoner of war after we were taken 
out of the hands of our original captors at JonesviJle, Ya. 

It now became very evident that the Rebels were moving the 
prisoners from Andersonville and elsewhere, so as to place them 
beyond the reach of Sherman and Stoneman. At my present 
place of confinement the fear of our recapture had also taken 
possession of the Eebel authorities, so the prisoners were sent 
off in much smaller squads than formerly, frequently not more 
than ten or fifteen in a gang, whereas, before, they never thought 
of dispatching less than two or three hundred together. 
I acknowledge that I began to get very uneasy, fearful that the 
" old soldier " dodge would not be much longer successful, and I 
would be forced back to my old haunts. It so happened, how- 
ever, that I managed to make it serve me, by getting detailed 
in the prison hospital as nurse, so that I was enabled to play 
another "dodge" upon the Rebel officers. At first, when the 
Sergeant would come around to find out who were able to walk, 
with assistance, to the depot, I was shaking with a chill, which, 
according to my representation, had not abated in the least for 
several hours. My teeth were actually chattering at the time, 
for I had learned how to make them do so. I was passed. The 
next day the orders for removal were more stringent than had 
yet been issued, stating that all who could stand it to be removed 
on stretchers must go. I concluded at once that I was gone, so 
as soon as I learned how matters were, I got out from under 
my dirty blanket, stood up and found I was able to walk, to my 
great astonishment, of course. An officer came early in the 
morning to muster us into ranks preparatory for removal. I 
fell in with the rest. We were marched out and around to the 
gate of the prison. 

Now, it so happened that just as we neared the gate of the 
prison, the prisoners were being marched from the Stockade. 
The officer in charge of us — we numbering possibly about ten 
— undertook to place us at the head of the column coming out, 
but the guard in charge of that squad refused to let him do so. 
We were then ordered to stand at one side with no g'uard over 
CIS but the officer who had brought us from the Hospital. 



A 8T0EY OP REBEL MILITABT PKI80N8. 481 

Taking this in at a glance, I concluded that now was my phanoe 
to make my second attempt to escape. I stepped behind the 
gate office (a small frame building with only one room), which 
was not more than six feet from me, and as luck (or Provi- 
dence) would have it, the negro man whose duty it was, as I 
knew, to wait on and take care of this office, and who had 
taken quite a liking for me, was standing at the back door. I 
winked at liim and threw him my blanket and the cup, at the 
same time telling him in a whisper to hide them away for me 
until he heard from me again. With a grin and a nod, he 
accepted the trust, and I started down along the walls of the 
Stockade alone. In order to make this more plain, and to show 
what a risk I was running at the time, I will state that between 
the Stockade and a brick wall, fully as high as the Stockade 
fence that was parallel with it, throughout its entire length on 
that side, there was a space of not more than thirty feet. On 
the outside of this Stockade was a platform, built for the 
guards to walk on, sufficiently near the top to allow them to 
look inside with ease, and on this side, on the platform, were 
three guards. I liad traveled about fifty feet only, from the 
gate office, when I heard the command to " Ilalt ! " I did so, 
of course. 

" Where are you going, you d — d Yank ? " said the guard. 

" Going after my clothes, that are over there in the wash,'' 
pointing to a small cabin just beyond the Stockade, where I 
happened to know that the officers had their washing done. 

" Oh, yes," said he ; " you are one of the Yank's that's been 
on parole, are you ? " 

" Yes." 

" Well, huriy up, or you will get left." 

The other guards heard this conversation and thinking it all 
right I was allowed to pass without further trouble. I went to 
the cabin in question — for I saw the last guard on the hne 
watching me, and boldly entered. I made a clear statement to 
the woman in charge of it about how I had made my escape, 
and asked her to secrete me in the house until night. I was 
soon convinced, however, from what she told me, as well as 
from my own knowledge of how things were managed in the 
Confederacy, that it would not be right for me to stay there, 
31 



482 



ANDEESOJS V ILLK. 



for if the house was searched and I found in it, it would be the 
worse for her. Therefore, not wishing to entail misery upon 
another, I begged her to give me something to eat, and going 




"where ake tot: going, tou d — d taitk?" 

to the swamp near by, succeeded in getting well hid therein, 
without detection. 

I lay there all day, and during the time had a very severe 
chill and afterwards a burning fever, so that when night came, 
knowing I could not travel, I resolved to return to the cabin 
and spend the night, and give myself up the next morning. 
There was no trouble in returning. I learned that my fears of 



A 8TOKT OF REBKL MILITAKT PEI80NB. 488 

the morning had not been groundless, for the guards had 
actually searched the house for me. The woman told them 
that I had got my clothes and left the house shortly after my 
entrance (which was the truth except the part about the clothes). 
I thanked her very kindly and begged to be allowed to stay in 
the cabin till morning, when I would present myself at Cap- 
tain H.'s office and suffer the consequences. This she allowed 
me to do. I shall ever feel grateful to this woman for her pro- 
tection. She was white and her given name was " SaLUe," but 
the other I have forgotten. 

About daylight I strolled over near the office and looked 
around there until I saw the Captain take his seat at his desk. 
I stepped into the door as soon as I saw that he was not occu- 
pied and saluted him " a la militaire" 

" Who are you ? " he asked ; " you look like a Tank." 

" Yes, sir," " said I, " I am called by that name since I was 
captured in the Federal Army." 

" Well, what are you doing here, and what is your name ? " 

I told him. 

" Why didn't you answer to your name when it was called at 
the gate yesterday, sir ? " 

" I never heard anyone call my name." 

" "Where were you ? " 

" I ran away down into the swamp." 

" Were you re-captured and brought back ? " 

"No, sir, I came back of my own accord." 

" What do you mean by this evasion ? " 

" I am not trying to evade, sir, or I might not have been 
here now. The truth is. Captain, I have been in many prisons 
since my capture, and have been treated very badly in all of 
them, until I came here." 

" I then explained to him freely my escape from Andersonville, 
and my subsequent re-capture, how it was that I had played 
" old soldier " etc. 

" Now," said I, " Captain, as long as I am a prisoner of war, 
I wish to stay with you, or under your command. This is my 
reason for running away yesterday, when I felt confident that 
if I did not do so I would be returned under Wirz's command, 
and, if I had been so returned, I would have killed myself 



4:84: ANDEESONVILLE. 

rather than submit to the untold tortures which he would have 
put me to, for having the audacity to attempt an escape from 
him." 

The Captain's attention was here called to some other mat- 
ters in hand, and I was sent back into the Stockade with a com- 
mand very pleasantly'- given, that I should stay there until 
ordered out, which I very gratefully promised to' do, and did- 
This was the last chance I ever had to talk to Captain Ilurt- 
rell, to my great sorrow, for I had really formed a hking for 
the man, notwithstanding the fact that he was a Rebel, and a 
commander of prisoners. 

The next day we all had to leave Macon. Whether we were 
able or not, the order was imperative. Great was my joy when 
I learned that we were on the way to Savannah and not to 
Andersonville. We traveled over the same road, so well 
described in one of j^our articles on Andersonville, and arrived 
in Savannah sometime' in the afternoon of the 21st day of 
November, 18G-i. Our squad was placed in some barracks and 
confined there until the next day. I was sick at the time, so 
sick in fact, that I could hardly hold my head up. Soon after, 
we were taken to the Florida depot, as they told us, to be 
shipped to some prison in those dismal swamps. I came near 
fainting when this was told to us, for I was confident that I 
could not survive another siege of prison life, if it was anything 
to compare to what I had already suffered. "When we arrived 
at the depot it was raining. The officer in charge of us wanted 
to know what train to put us on, for there were two, if not 
three, trains waiting orders to start. He was told to march us 
on to a certain flat car, near by, but before giving the order he 
demanded a receipt for us, which the train officer refused. We 
were accordingly taken back to our quarters, which proved to 
be a most fortunate circumstance. 

On the 23d day of Kovember, to our great relief, we were 
called upon to sign a parole preparatory to being sent down the 
river on the flag-boat to our exchange ships, then lying in the 
harbor. AYhen I say we, I mean those of us that had recently 
come from Macon, and a few others, who had also been fortunate 
in reaching Savannah in small squads. The other poor fellows, 
who had already been loaded on the trains, were taken away to 



A BTORT OF EKBKL MILITARY PRISONS. 485 

Florida, and many of them never lived to return. On the 24th 
those of us who had been paroled were taken on board our ships, 
and were once more safely housed imder that great, glorious 
and beautiful Star Spangled Banner. Long may she wave. 



CHAPTER LXIII. 

DKEAKY "WEATHER — THE COLD RAINS DISTRESS ALL AITO KILL HUH- 

DRED8 EXCHANGE OF TEN THOUSAND 8ICK CAPTAIN B0WE8 

TURNS A PRETTY, BUT NOT VERT HONEST, PENNY. 

As November wore away long-continued, chill, searching rains 
desolated our days and nights. The great, cold drops pelted 
down slowly, dismally, and incessantly. Each seemed to beat 
through our emaciated frames against the very marrow of our 
bones, and to be battering its way remorselessly into the 
citadel of life, like the cruel drops that fell from the basin of 
the inquisitors upon the firmly-fastened head of their victim, 
until his reason fled, and the death-agony cramped his heart to 
stillness. 

The lagging, leaden hours were inexpressibly dreary. Com- 
pared with many others, we were quite comfortable, as our 
hut protected us from the actual beating of the rain upon our 
bodies ; but we were much more miserable than under the swel- 
terino" heat of Andersonville, as we lay almost naked upon 
our bed of pine lea,Yes , shivering in the raw, rasping air, and 
looked out over acres of wretches lying dumbly on the sodden 
sand, receiving the benumbing drench of the sullen skies with- 
out a groan or a motion. * 

It was enough to kill healthy, vigorous men, active and reso- 
lute, with bodies well-no arished and well clothed, and with 
minds vivacious and hopeful, to stand these day-and-night-long 
cold drenchings. No one can imagine how fatal it was to boys 
whose vitality was sapped by long months in Andersonville, by 
coarse, meager, changeless food, by groveling on the bare earth, 
and by hopelessness as to any improvement of condition. 



A STORY OF REBEL MILITABT PRISONS. 487 

Fever, rheumatism, throat and lung diseases and despair now 
came to complete the work begun by scurvy, dysentery and 
gangrene, in Anderson ville. 

Hundreds, weary of the long struggle, and of hoping against 
hope, laid themselves down and yielded to their fate. In the 
six weeks that we were at Millen, one man in every ten died. 
The ghostly pines there sigh over the unnoted graves of seven 
hundred boys, for whom life's morning closed in the gloomiest 
shadows. As many as would form a splendid regiment — as 
many as constitute the first born of a populous City — more 
than three times as many as were slain outright on our side in 
the bloody battle of Franklin, succumbed to this new hardship. 
The country for Avhich they died does not even have a record 
of their names. They were simply blotted out of existence; 
they became as though they had never been. 

About the middle of the month the Eebels yielded to the 
importunities of our Government so far as to agree to exchange 
ten thousand sick. The Eebel Surgeons took praiseworthy 
care that our Government should profit as little as possible by 
this, by sending every hopeless case, every man whose lease of 
life was not likely to extend much beyond his reaching the 
parole boat. If he once reached our receiving officers it was 
all that was necessary ; he counted to them as much as if he 
had been a Goliah, A very large portion of those sent 
through died on the way to our lines, or within a few hours 
after their transports at being once more under the old Stars 
and Stripes had moderated. 

The sending of the sick through gave our commandant — 
Captain Bowes — a fine opportunity to fill his pockets, by con- 
niving at the passage of well men. There was still considera 
ble money in the hands of a few prisoners. . All this, and more, 
too, were they willing to give for their lives. In the first batch 
that went away were two of the leading sutlers at Anderson- 
ville, who had accumulated perhaps one thousand dollars 
each by their shrewd and successful bartering. It was generally 
behevcd that they gave every cent to Bowes for the privilege 
of leaving. I know nothing of the truth of this, but I am reas. 
onably certain that they paid him very handsomely. 



488 AlfDEKSONVILLE- 

Soon we heard that one hundred and fifty dollars each had 
been sufficient to buy some men out ; then one hundred, seventy- 
five, fifty, thirty, twenty, ten, and at last five dollars. Whether 
the upright Bowes drew the line at the latter figure, and refused 
to sell his honor for less than tlie ruling rates of a street- walk- 
er's virtue, I know not. It was the lowest quotation that came 
to my knowledge, but lie may have gone cheaper. I have 
always observed that when men or women begin to traffic in 
themselves, their price falls as rapidly as that of a piece of 
tainted meat in hot weatlier. If one could buy them at the 
rate they wind up with, and sell them at their first price, there 
would be room for an enormous profit. 

The cheapest I ever knew a Rebel ofiicer to bo bought was 
some weeks after this at Florence. The sick exchange was still 
going on. I have before spoken of the Rebel passion for bright 
gilt buttons. It used to be a proverbial comment upon the 
small treasons that were of daily occurrence on both sides, that 
you could Ijuv the soul of a mean man in our crowd for a pint 
of corn meal, and tlie soul of a Rebel guard for a half dozen 
brass buttons. A boy of the Fifth-fourth Ohio, whose home 
was at or near Lima, O., wore a blue vest, with the gilt, bright- 
rimmed buttons of a staff officer. The Rebel Surgeon who was 
examining the sick for exchange saw the buttons and admired 
them very much. The boy stepped back, borrowed a knife 
from a comrade, cut the buttons off, and handed them to the 
Doctor. 

" All right, sir," said he as his itching palm closed over the 
coveted ornaments ; " you can pass," and pass he did to home 
and friends. 

Captain Bowes's merchandizing in the matter of exchange 
was as open as the issuing of rations. His agent in conducting 
the bargaining was a Raider — a New York gambler and 
stool-pigeon — whom we called " Mattie." He dealt quite fairly, 
for several times when the exchange was interrupted, Bowes 
sent the money back to those who had paid him, and received 
it again when the exchange was renewed. 

Had it been possible to buy our way out for five cents each 
Andrews and I would have had to stay back, since we had not 
Ijad that much money for months, and all our friends were in 



A STORY OF KEBBL MILITARY PRISONS. 489" 

an equally bad plight. Like almost everybody else we had 
spent the few dollars we happened to have on entering prison, 
in a week or so, and since then we had been entirely penniless. 

There was no hope left for us but to try to pass the Surgeons 
as desperately sick, and we expended our energies in simulating 
this condition. Rheumatism was our f orte^ and I flatter mysc) f 
we got up two cases that were apparently bad enough to serve 
as illustrations for a patent medicine advertisement. But it 
would not do. Bad as we made our condition appear, there 
were so many more who were infinitely worse, that Ave stood no 
show in the competitive examination. I doubt if we would 
have been given an average of " 50 " in a report. We had to 
stand back, and see about one quarter of our number march 
out and away home. We could not complain at this — much 
as we wanted to go ourselves, — since there could be no question 
that these poor fellows deserved the precedence. We did 
grumble savagely, however, at Captain Bowes's venality, in 
selling out chances to mone3"ed men, since these were invariably 
those who were best prepared to withstand the hardships of 
imprisonment, as they were mostly new men, and all had good 
clothes and blankets. We did not blame the men, however, 
since it was not in human nature to resist an opportunity to get 
away — at any cost — from that accursed place. " All that a 
man hath he will give for his life," and I think that if I had 
owned the City of New York in fee simple, I would have given 
it away willingl}'', rather than staid in prison another month. 

The sutlers, to whom I have alluded above, had accumulated 
sufficient to supply themselves with all the necessaries and some 
of the comforts of life, during any probable term of impris- 
onment, and still have a f-nug amount left, but they would 
rather give it all up and return to service with their regiments 
in the field, than take the chances of any longer continuance in 
prison. 

I can only surmise how much Bowes realized out of the 
prisoners by his venality, but I feel sure that it could not have 
been less than three thousand doUars, and I would not be 
astonished to learn that it was ten thousand dollars in green- 
backs. 



CHAPTER LXiy. 

ANOTHER REMOVAL SHERMAn's ADVANCE SCARES THE REBBXi 

INTO RIJNNLNQ US AWAY FROM MILLEN WE ARE TAKEN TO 

SAVANNAH, AND THENCE DOWN THE ATLANITO & GULF ROAD TO 
BLACKSHEAR. 

One night, toward the last of November, there was a general 
alarm around the prison. A gun was fired from the Fort, the 
long-roll was beaten in the various camps of the guards, and 
the regiments answered by getting under arms in haste, and 
forming near the prison gates. 

The reason for this, which we did not learn until weeks later, 
was that Sherman, who had cut loose from Atlanta, and started 
on his famous March to the Sea, had taken such a course as 
rendered it probable that Millen was one of his objective points. 
It was, therefore, necessary that we should be hurried away 
with all possible speed. As we had had no news from Sherman 
since the end of the Atlanta campaign, and were ignorant of 
his having begun his great raid, we were at an utter loss to 
account for the commotion among our keepers. 

About 3 o'clock in the morning the Eebel Sergeants, who 
called the roll, came in and ordered us to turn out immediately 
and get ready to move. 

The morning was one of the most cheerless I ever knew. A 
cold rain poured relentlessly down upon us half-naked, shiver- 
ing wretches, as we groped around in the darkness for our 
pitiful little belongings of rags and cooking utensils, and hud- 
dled together in groups, urged on continually by the curses and 
abuse of the Rebel officers sent in to get us ready to move. 

Though roused at 3 o'clock, the cars were not ready to receive 



A STORY OF REBEL inLITARY PRISONS. 491 

US till nearly noon. In the meantime ^Ye stood in ranks — 
numb, trembling-, and heart-sick. The guards around us crouched 
over fires, and shielded themselves as best they could with 
blankets and bits of tent cloth. We had nothing to build fires 
with, and were not allowed to approach those of the guards. 

Around us everywhere was the dull, cold, gray, hopeless 
desolation of the approach of "Winter. The hard, wiry grass 
that thinly covered the once arid sand, the occasional stunted 
weeds, and the sparse foliage of the gnarled and dwarfish under- 
growth, all were parched brown and sere by the fiery heat of 
the long Summer, and now rattled drearily under the pitiless, 
cold rain, streaming from lowering clouds that seemed to 
have floated down to us from the cheerless summit of some 
great iceberg ; the tall, naked pines moaned and shivered ; dead, 
sapless leaves fell wearily to the sodden earth, like withered 
hopes drifting down to deepen some Slough of Despond. 

Scores of our crowd found this the culmination of their misery. 
They laid down upon the ground and yielded to death as a 
welcome relief, and we left them lying there unburied when we 
moved to the cars. 

As we passed through the Eebel camp at dawn, on our way 
to the cars, Andrews and I noticed a nest of four large, bright, 
new tin pans — a rare thing in the Confederacy at tliat time. 
We managed to snatch them without the guard's attention 
being attracted, and in an instant had them wrapped up in our 
blanket. But the blanket was full of holes, and in spite of all 
our efforts, it would slip at the most inconvenient times, so as 
to show a broad glare of the bright metal, just when it seemed 
it could not help attracting the attention of the guards or theuf 
officers. A dozen times at least we were on the imminent brink 
of detection, but we finally got our treasures safely to the cars, 
and sat down upon them. 

The cars were open flats. The rain still beat down unrelent- 
ingly. Andrews and I huddled ourselves together so as to 
make our bodies afford as much heat as possible, pulled our 
faithful old overcoat around us as far as it would go, and endured 
the inclemency as best we could. 

Our train headed back to Savannah, and again our hearts 
warmed up with hopes of exchange. It seemed as if there could 



493 AJIDEJJSONVILLa. 

be no other purpose of taking us out of a prison so recently 
establislied and at such cost as Millen. 

As we approached the coast the rain ceased, but a piercing 
cold wind set in, that threatened to convert our soaked rags 
into icicles. 

Yerj many died on the way. When we arrived at Savannah 
almost, if not quite, every car had upon it one whom hunger no 
longer gnawed or disease wasted ; whom cold had pinched for 
the last time, and for whom the golden portals of the Beyond 
had opened for an exchange that neither Davis nor his despicable 
tool, Winder, could control. 

We did not sentimentalize over these. 'We could not mourn ; 
the thousands that we had seen pass away made that emotion 
hackneyed and wearisome ; witli the death of some friend and 
comrade as regularly an event of each day as roll call and ch'a\ving 
rations, the sentiment of grief had become nearly obsolete. 
We were not hardened ; we had simply come to look upon death 
as commonplace and ordinary. To have had no one dead or 
dying around us would have been regarded as singular. 

Besides, why should we feel any regret at the passing away 
of those wliose condition would probably be bettered thereby ? 
It was difficult to see where we who still lived were any better 
off than they who were gone before and now " forever at peace, 
each in his windowless palace of rest." If imprisonment was 
to continue only another month, we would rather be with them. 

Arriving at Savannah, we were ordered off the cars. A squad 
from each car carried the dead to a designated spot, and laid 
them in a row, composing their limbs as well as possible, but 
giving no other funeral rites, not even making a record of their 
names and regiments. Negro laborers came along afterwards, 
with carts, took the bodies to some vacant ground, and sunk 
them out of sight in the sand. 

We were given a few crackers each — the same rude imitation 
of "hard tack" that had been served out to us when we arrived 
at Savannah the first time, and then were marched over and 
put upon a train on the Atlantic & Gulf Railroad, running 
from Savannah along the sea coast towards Florida. AVhat 
this meant we had little conception, but hope, which sprang 
eternal in the prisoner's breast, whispered that perhaps it was 



A STORY OF REBEL MILITABT PRISOHS. 493 

exchange; that there ^Yas some difficulty about our vessels 
coming to Savannah, and we were being taken to some other 
more convenient sea port ; probably to Florida, to deliver us to 
our folks there. We satisfied ourselves that we were running 
along the sea coast by tasting the water in the streams wo 
crossed, whenever we could get an opportunity to dip up some. 
As long as the water tasted salty we knew we were near the 
sea, and hope burned brightly. 

The truth was — as we afterwards learned — the Rebels were 
terribly puzzled what to do with us. We were brought to 
Savannah, ')ut that did not solve the problem; and we were 
sent down the Atlantic & Gulf road as a temporary expedient. 

The railroad was the worst of the many bad ones which it 
was my fortune to ride upon in my excursions while a guest of 
of the Southern Confederacy. It had run down until it had 
nearly reached the worn-out condition of that Western road, of 
which an employe of a rival route once said, "that all there 
was left of it now was two streaks of rust and the right of 
way." As it was one of the non-essential roads to the Southern 
Confederacy, it was stripped of the best of its rolling-stock and 
machinery to supply the other more important lines. 

I have before mentioned the scarcity of grease in the South* 
and the difficulty of supj^lying the railroads with lubricants. 
Apparently there had been no oil on the Atlantic & Gulf since 
the beginning of the war, and the screeches of the dry axles 
revolving in the worn-out boxes were agonizing. Some thing 
would break on the cars or blow out on the engine every few 
miles, necessitating a long stop for repairs. Then there was no 
supply of fuel along the line. When the engine ran out of 
wood it would halt, and a couple of negros ridmg on the 
tender would assail a panel of fence or a fallen tree with their 
axes, and after an hour or such matter of hard chopping, would 
pile sufficient wood upon the tender to enable us to renew our 
journey. 

Frequently the engine stopped as if from sheer fatigue or 
inanition. The Rebel officers tried to get us to assist it up the 
grade by dismounting and pushing behind. We respectfully, 
but firmly, declined. We were gentlemen of leisure, we said, 
and decidedly averse to manual labor; we had been invited on 



494 AI^^DEKSONVLLLE. 

this excursion by Mr. Jeff. Davis and his friends, who set them- 
selves up as our entertainers, and it would bo a gross breach of 
hospitality to reflect upon our hosts by working our passage. 
If this was insisted upon, we should certainly not visit them 
again. Besides, it made no difference to us whether the train 
got along or not. We were not losing anything by the delay ; 
we were not anxious to go anywhere. One part of the Southern 
Confederacy was just as good as another to us. So not a finger 
could they persuade any of us to raise to help along the journey. 

The country we were traversing was sterile and poor — worse 
even than that in the neighborhood of ADdersonville. Farms 
and farm-houses were scarce, and of towns there were none. 
Not even a collection of houses big enough to justify a black- 
smith shop or a store appeared along the whole route. But 
few fields of any kind were seen, and nowhere was there a farm 
which gave evidence of a determined effort on the part of its 
occupants to till the soil and to improve their condition. 

"When the train stopped for wood, or for repairs, or from 
exhaustion, we were allowed to descend from the cars and 
stretch our numbed limbs. It did us good in other ways, too. It 
seemed almost happiness to be outside of those cursed Stockades, 
to rest our eyes by looking away through the woods, and seeing 
birds and animals that v^Grefree. They must be happy, because 
to us to be free once more was the summit of earthly happi- 
ness. 

There was a chance, too, to pick up something green to eat, 
and we were famishing for this. The scurvy stiU fingered in 
our systems, and we were hungry for an antidote. A plant grew 
rather plentifully along the track that looked very much as I 
imagine a palm leaf fan does in its green state. The leaf 
was not so large as an ordinary palm leaf fan, and came directly 
out of the ground. The natives caUed it " bull-grass," but any- 
thing more unhke grass I never saw, so we rejected that nomen. 
clature, and dubbed them " green fans." They were very hard 
to pull up, it being usually as much as the strongest of us 
could do to draw them out of the ground. When pulled up 
there was found the smallest bit of a stock — not as much as 
a joint of one's little finger — that was eatable. It had no par- 
ticular taste, and probably fittle nutriment, stiU it was fresh and 



A 8TOKY or aKBKL MILITAJST PKI80K8. 496 

^een, and we strained our weak muscles and enfeebled sinews 
at every opportunity, endeavoring to pull up a " green fan." 

At one place where we stopped there was a makeshift of a 
garden, one of those sorry " truck patches," which do poor duty 
about Southern cabins for the kitchen gardens of the Northern 
farmers, and produce a few coarse cow peas, a scanty lot of 
coUards (a coarse kind of cabbage, with a stalk about a yard 
long) and some onions to vary the usual side-meat and corn pone 
diet of the Georgia " cracker." Scanning the patch's ruins of 
vine and stalk, Andrews espied a handful of onions, which had 
remained ungathered. They tempted hhn as the apple did Eve. 
"Without stopping to communicate his intention to me, he sprang 
from the car, snatched the onions from their bed, pulled up 
half a dozen collard stalks and was on his way back 
before the guard could make up his mind to fire upon him. The 
swiftness of his motions saved his life, for had he been more 
deliberate the guard would have concluded he was trying to 
escape, and shot him down. As it was he was returning back 
before the guard could get his gun up. The onions he had 
secured were to us more delicious than wine upon the lees. They 
seemed to find their way into every fiber of our bodies, and 
invigorate every organ. The coUard stalks he had snatched up 
in the expectation of finding in them something resembling the 
nutritious " heart " that we remembered as children, seeking and 
finding in the stalks of cabbage. But we were disappointed. 
The stalks were as dry and rotten as the bones of Southern 
society. Even hunger could find no meat in them. 

.After some days of this leisurely journeying toward the South, 
we halted permanently about eighty-six miles from Savannah. 
There was no reason why we should stop there more than any 
place else where we had been or were likely to go. It seemed 
as if the Eebels had simply tired of hauling us, and dumped us 
off. We had another lot of dead, accumulated since we left 
Savannah, and the scenes at that place were repeated. 

The train returned for another load of prisoners. 



CHAPTEE LXV. 

BLACKBHEAB AND PIEECE COUNTY WE TAKE UP NEW QUAKTEB8, 

BUT ARE CALLED OUT FOR EXCHANGE EXCITEMENT OVER BION- 

INO THE PAROLE A HAPPT JOURNEY TO 8AVANNAH GRIBT- 

OUS DISAPPOINTMENT. 

We were informed that the place we were at was Blackshear, 
and that it was the Court House, i. e., the County seat of Pierce 
County. Where they kept the Court House, or County seat, is 
beyond conjecture to me, since I could not see a half dozen 
houses in the Avhole clearing", and not one of them was a respectar 
ble dwelling, taking even so low a standard for respectable 
dwellings as that afforded by the majority of Georgia houses. 

Pierce County, as I have since learned by the census report, 
is one of the poorest Counties of a poor section of a very poor 
State. A population of less than two thousand is thinly scat- 
tered over its five hundred square miles of territory, and gain 
a meager subsistence by a weak simulation of cultivating patches 
of its sandy dunes and plains in " nubbin " corn and dropsical 
sweet potatos. A few " razor-back " hogs — a species so gaunt 
and thin that I heard a man once declare that he had stopped a 
lot belonging to a neighbor from crawling through the cracks 
of a tight board fence by simply tying a knot in their tails — 
roam the woods, and supply all the meat used, 

Andrews used to insist that some of the hogs which we saw 
were so thin that the connection between their fore and hind- 
quarters was only a single thickness of skin, with hair on both 
sides — but then Andrews sometimes seemed to me to have a 
tendency to exaggerate. 

The swine certainly did have proportions that strongly 



A BTOEY OF REBEL UrLITABT PEI80N8. 497 

resembled those of the animals which children cut out of card- 
board. They were like the geometrical definition of a super- 
fice — all length and breadth, and no thickness. A ham from 
them would look lil:e a palm-leaf fan. 

I never ceased to marvel at the delicate adjustment of the 
development of animal life to the soil in these lean sections of 
Georgia. The poor land would not maintain anything but 
lank, lazy men, with few wants, and none but lank, lazy men, 
with few wants, sought a maintenance from it. I may have 
tangled up cause and effect, in this proposition, but if so, the 
reader can disentangle them at his leisure. 

I was not astonished to learn that it took five hundred square 
miles of Pierce County land to maintain two thousand "crackers," 
even as poorly as they lived. I should want fully that much 
of it to support one fair-sized Northern family as it should be. 

After leaving the cars we were marched off into the pine 
woods, by the side of a considerable stream, and told that this 
was to be our camp. A heavy guard was placed around us, 
and a number of pieces of artillery mounted where they would 
command the camp. 

We started in to make ourselves comfortable, as at Millen, 
by building shanties. The prisoners we left behind followed 
us, and we soon had our old crowd of five or six thousand, who 
had been our companions at Savannah and Millen, again with 
us. The place looked very favorable for escape. We knew 
we were still near the sea coast — really not more than forty 
miles away — and we felt that if we could once get there we 
should be safe. Andrews and I meditated plans of escape, and 
toiled away at our cabin. 

About a week after our arrival we were startled by an order 
for the one thousand of us who had first arrived to get ready 
to move out. In a few minutes we were taken outside the 
guard line, massed_close together, and informed in a few words 
by a Rebel officer that we were about to be taken back to 
Savannah for exchange. 

The announcement took away our breath. For an instant 
the rush of emotion made us speechless, and when utterance 
returned, the first use we made of it was to join in one simul- 
taneous outburst of acclamation. Those inside the guard fine, 
32 



498 AirDEKSONVILLB, 

understanding what our cheer meant, answered us with a loud 
shout of congratulation — the first real, genuine, hearty cheer- 
ing that had been done since receiving the announcement of 
the exchange at Andersonville, three months before. 

As soon as the excitement had subsided somewhat, the Rebel 
proceeded to explain that we would all be required to sign a 
parole. This set us to thinking. After our scornful rejection 
of the proposition to enlist in the Rebel army, the Rebels had 
felt around among us considerably as to how we were disposed 
toward taking what was called the " Non-Combatant's Oath ; " 
that is, the swearing not to take up arms against the 
Southern Confederacy again during the war. To the most of 
us this seemed only a little less dishonorable than joining the 
Rebel army. "We held that our oaths to our own Government 
placed us at its disposal until it chose to discharge us, and we 
could not make any engagements with its enemies that might 
come in contravention of that duty. In short, it looked very 
much hke desertion, and this we did not feel at liberty to con- 
sider. 

There were still many among us, who, feeling certain that 
they could not survive imprisonment much longer, were disposed 
to look favorably upon the Non-Combatant's Oath, thinking that 
the circumstances of the case would justify their apparent dere- 
liction from duty. Whether it would or not I must leave to more 
skilled casuists than myself to decide. It was a matter I 
believed every man must settle with his own conscience. The 
opinion that I then held and expressed was, that if a boy felt 
that he was hopelessly sick, and that he could not live if he 
remained in prison, he was justified in taking the Oath. In the 
absence of our own Surgeons he would have to decide for him- 
self whether he was sick enough to be warranted in resorting to 
this means of saving his life. If he was in as good health as the 
majority of us were, with a reasonable prospect of surviving 
some weeks longer, there was no excuse for taking the Oath, for, 
in that few weeks we might be exchanged, be recaptured, or 
make our escape. I think this was the general opinion of the 
prisoners. 

"While the Rebel was talking about our signing the parole, 
there flashed upon all of us at the same moment, a suspicion that 



A 8TOKT OF BKBEL iilLTTAXY PRISOlff*. 4:99 

this was a trap to delude us into signing the Non-Combatant'a 
Oath. Instantly there went up a general shout : 
" Eead the parole to us." 

The Rebel was handed a blank parole by a companion, and 
he read over the printed condition at the top, which was that 
those signing agreed not to bear arms against the Confederacy 
in the field, or in garrison, not to man any worlds, assist in any 
expedition, do any sort of guard duty, serve in any military 
constabulary, or perform any kind of military service until 
'properly exchanged. 

For a minute this was satisfactory ; then their ingrained dis- 
trust of any thing a Rebel said or did returned, and they 
shouted : 
" No, no ; let some of us read it ; let * Illinoy ' read it*" 
The Rebel looked around in a puzzled manner. 
" Who the h— 1 is < Illinoy \ ' Where is he 3 " said he. 
I saluted and said : 
" That's a nickname they give me." 

" Yery well," said he, " get up on this stump and read this 
parole to these d — d fools that won't beheve me." 

I mounted the stump, took the blank from his hand and read 
it over slowly, giving as much emphasis as possible to the aU- 
important clause at the end — " untU properly exchomged?'* I 
then said : 

" Boys, this seems aU right to me," and they answered, with 
almost one voice : 
" Yes, that's aU right. We'll sign that." 
I was never so proud of the American soldier-boy as at that 
moment. They aU felt that signing that paper was to give 
them freedom and hfe. They knew too well from sad experi- 
ence what the alternative was. Many felt that unless released 
another week would see them in their graves. All knew that 
every day's stay in Rebel hands greatly lessened their chances 
of life. Yet in all that thousand there was not one voice 
in favor of yielding a tittle of honor to save life. They would 
secure their freedom honorably, or die faithfully. Remember 
that this was a miscellaneous crowd of boys, gathered from all 
sections of the country, and from many of whom no exalted 
conceptions of duty and honor were expected. I wish some one 



600 AJTDEBSONVILLE. 

would point out to me, on the brightest pages of knightly 
record, some deed of lealty and truth that equals the simple 
fidelity of these unknown heros. I do not think that one of 
them felt that he was doing anything especially meritorious. 
He only obeyed the natural promptings of his loyal heart. 

The business of signing the paroles was then begun in earnest. 
"We were separated into squads according to the first letters of 
our names, all those whose name began with A being placed in 
one squad, those beginning with B, in another, and so on- 
Blank paroles for each letter were spread out on boxes and 
planks at different places, and the signing went on under the 
superintendence of a Rebel Sergeant and one of the prisoners. 
The squad of M's selected me to superintend the signing for us, 
and I stood by to direct the boys, and sign for the very few 
who could not write. After this was done we fell into ranks 
again, called the roll of the signers, and carefully compared 
the number of men with the number of signatures so that 
nobody should pass unparoled. The oath was then administered 
to us, and two day's rations of corn meal and fresh beef were 
issued. 

This formality removed the last lingering doubt that we had 
of the exchange being a reality, and we gave way to the 
happiest emotions. We cheered ourselves hoarse, and the 
fellows still inside followed our example, as they expected that 
they would share our good fortune in a day or two. 

Our next performance was to set to work, cook our two days' 
rations at once and eat them. This was not very difficult, as 
the whole supply for two days would hardly make one square 
meal. That done, many of the boys went to the guard 
line and threw their blankets, clothing, cooking utensils, etc., 
to their comrades who were still inside. I^o one thought they 
would have any further use for such things. 

" To-morrow, at this time, thank Heaven," said a boy near 
me, as he tossed his blanket and overcoat back to some one 
inside, " we'll be in God's country, and then I wouldn't touch 
them d d lousy old rags with a ten-foot pole." 

One of the boys in the M squad was a Maine infantryman, 
who had been with me in the Pemberton building, in Rich- 



A STORY OF REBEL MILITAJiY PRISONS. 



501 



mond, and had fashioned himself a little square pan out of a tin 
plate of a tobacco press, such as I have described in an earlier 
chapter. He had carried it with him ever since, and it was his 
sole vessel for all purposes — for cooking, carrying water, 
drawing rations, etc. lie had cherished it as if it were a farm 




^^'Mr 




or a good situation. But now, as he 
turned away from signing his name to 
the parole, he looked at his faithful ser- 
vant for a minute in undisguised con- 
tempt ; on the eve of restoration to 
happier, better things, it was a reminder 
of all the petty, inglorious contemptible 
trials and sorrows he had endured ; he 
actually loathed it for its remembrances, 
and flinging it upon the ground he crushed 
raiT THREW THTEiR BLANKKT8, \\^ q^j^ of all shapc aud usefulucss with 

KTC, TO TH08K tNi-il>B. y • o . , T -j. 1 1J 

his feet, tramplmg upon it as he would 
like to trample upon everything connected with his prison life. 

Months afterward, I had to lend this man my little can to 
cook his rations in. 

Andrews and I flung the bright new tin pans we had stolen 
at Millen inside the line, to be scrambled for. It was hard to 
tell who were the most surprised at their appearance — the 
Rebels or our own boys — ■ for few had any idea that there were 
such things in the whole Confederacy, and certainly none 
looked for them in the possession of two such poverty-stricken 



502 



AlODKBSONTILLK. 



specimens as we were. We thought it best to retain possession 
of our little can, spoon, chess-board, blanket, and overcoat. 

As we marched down and boarded the train, the Rebels con- 
firmed their previous action by taking all the guards from 
around us. Only some eight or ten were sent to the train, and 
these quartered themselves in the caboose, and paid us no fur- 
ther attention. 

The train rolled away amid cheering by ourselves and those 
we left behind. One thousand happier hoys than we never 
started on a journey. TF<s were going honis. That was enough 

to wreathe the skies with 



iiiiiiiiiii''' 



ti)if!!B!p^H!:lii:il||i;,:ii|!|| 



WfW' 



'mr 



glory, and fill the world 
with sweetness and light. 
The wintry sun had some- 
thing of geniality an 
warmth, the landscape Ids* 
some of its repulsiveness, the 
dreary palmettos had less of 
that hideousness which made 
us regard them as very fit- 
ting emblems of treason. 
We even began to feel a 
little good-humored con- 
tempt for our hateful little 
Brats of guards, and to re- 
flect how much vicious edu- 
cation and surroundings 
were to be held responsible 
for their misdeeds. 

We laughed and sang as 
we rolled along toward Sa- 
vannah — going back much 
faster than we came. We 
re-told old stories, and re- 
peated old jokes, that had become wearisome months and 
months ago, but were now freshened up and given their olden 
pith by the joyousness of the occasion. We revived and talked 
over old schemes gotten up in the earlier days of prison life, of 




HK CRUSHED rr OUT OF ALL SHAPE 



JL 8T0BY OF KEBEL MILITARY PRISONS. 503 

what " we would do when we got out," but almost forgotten 
since, in the general uncertainty of ever getting out. We 
exchanged addresses, and promised faithfully to write to each 
other and tell how we found everything at home. 

So the afternoon and night passed. "We were too excited to 
sleep, and passed the hours watching the scenery, recalling the 
objects we had passed on the way to Blackshear, and guessing 
how near we were to Savannah. 

Though we were running along within fifteen or twenty miles 
of the coast, with all our guards asleep in the caboose, no one 
thought of escape. We could step off the cars and walk over 
to the seashore as easily as a man steps out of his door and walks 
to a neighboring town, but why should we ? Were we not 
going directly to our vessels in the harbor of Savannah, and 
was it not better to do this, than to take the chances of escaping, 
and encounter the difficulties of reaching our blockaders ? We 
thought so, and we staid on the cars. 

A cold, gray Winter morning was just breaking as we reached 
Savannah. Our train ran down in the City, and then whistled 
sharply and ran back a mile or so ; it repeated this manuver 
two or three times, the evident design being to keep us on the 
cars until the people were ready to receive us. Finally our 
engine ran with all the speed she was capable of, and as the 
train dashed into the street we found ourselves between two 
heavy lines of guards with bayonets fixed. 

The whole sickening reality was made apparent by one glance 
at the guard line. Our parole was a mockery, its only object 
being to get us to Savannah as easily as possible, and to pre- 
vent benefit from our recapture to any of Sherman's Eaiders, 
who might make a dash for the railroad while we were in 
transit. There had been no intention of exchanging us. There 
was no exchange going on at Savannah. 

After all, I do not think we felt the disappointment as keenly 
as the first time we were brought to Savannah. Imprisonment 
had stupefied us ; we were duller and more hopeless. 

Ordered down out of the cars, we were formed in line in the 
street. 

Said a Kebel officer : 



604 AKDERSONTILLB. 

" Now, any of you fellahs that ah too sick U) go to Chahls- 
ton, step fohwahd one pace." 

We looked at each other an instant, and then the whole line 
stepped forward. We all felt too sick to go to Charleston, or 
to do anything else in the world. 



CHAPTEK LXYI. 

A. SPECIMEN CONVERSATION WITH AN AVERAGE NATIVE OEOROIAN 

WE LEARN THAT SHERMAN 18 HEADING FOR SAVANNAH THB 

RESERVES GET A LITTLE SETrLING DOWN. 

As the train left the northern suburbs of Savannah we came 
upon a scene of busy activity, strongly contrasting with the 
somnolent lethargy that seemed to be the normal condition of 
the City and its inhabitants. Long lines of earth\rorks were 
being constructed, gangs of negros were felling trees, building 
forts and batteries, making abatis, and toiling v^^ith numbers of 
huge guns which were being moved out and placed in position. 

As we had had no new prisoners nor any papers for some weeks 
— the papers being doubtless designedly kept away from us — we 
were at a loss to know what this meant. We could not under- 
stand this erection of fortifications on that side, because, knowins 
as we did how well the flanks of the City were protected by the 
Savannah and Ogeeche Rivers, we could not see how a force 
'from the coast — whence we supposed an attack must come, 
could hope to reach the City's rear, especially as we had just 
come up on the right flank of the City, and saw no sign of our 
folks in that direction. 

Our train stopped for a few minutes at the edge of this Une 
of works, and an old citizen who had been surveying the scene 
with senile interest, tottered over to our car to take a look at 
us. lie was a type of the old man of the South of the scanty 
middle class, the small farmer. Long white, hair and beard, 
spectacles with great round, staring glasses, a broad-brimmed 
hat of ante-Revolutionary pattern, clothes that had apparently 
descended to him from some ancestor who had come over with 



606 



ANDERSONVILLK. 



Oglethorpe, and a two-handed staff with a head of buckhoriij 
upon which he leaned as old peasants do in plays, formed such 
an image as recalled to me the picture of the old man in the 
illustratious in " The Dairyman's Daughter." He was as gar- 
rulous as a magpie, and as opin- 
ionated as a Southern white 
always is. 

Halting in front of our car, 
he steadied himself by planting 
his staff, clasping it with both 
lean and skinny hands, and 
leaning forward upon it, his 
jaws then addressed themselves 
to motion thus : 

"Boys, who mout these be 
that ye got ? " 

One of the Guards — "O, these 
is some Yanks that we've bin 
hjvin' down at Camp Sumter." 
"Yes?" (with an upward 
inflection of the voice, followed 
by a close scrutiny of us through 
the goggle-eyed glasses,) " Wall, 
they're a powerful ornary look- 
in' lot, I'U declah." 
It will be seen that the old gentleman's perceptive powers 
were much more highly developed than his politeness. 

" Well, they ain't what ye mout call purty, that's a fack," 
said the guard. 

" So yer Yanks, air ye ? " said the venerable Goober-Grabber, 
(the nick-name in the South for Georgians), directing his con- 
versation to me. "Wall, I'm powerful glad to see ye, an' 
'specially whar ye can't do no harm ; I've wanted to see some 
Yankees ever sence the beginnin' of the wah, but hev never had 
no chance. Whah did ye cum from ? " 

I seemed called upon to answer, and said : " I came from 
Illinois ; most of the boys in this car are from Illinois, Ohio, 
Indiana, Michigan and Iowa." 
♦* 'Deed 1 All Westerners, air ye ? Wall, do ye know I aUuz 




▼flO MOCT THEBB BB t 



A STORY OF REBEL MILITARY PRISONS. 507 

liked the "Westerners a heap sight better than them blue-bellied 
New England Yankees." 

No discussion with a Kebel ever proceeded very far without 
his making an assertion like this. It was a favorite declaration 
of their's, but its absurdity was comical, when one remembered 
that the majority of them, could not for their lives tell the 
names of the New England States, and could no more distinguish 
a Downeaster from an Illinoisan than they could tell a Saxon 
from a Bavarian. One day, while I was holding a conversation 
similar to the above with an old man on guard, another guard, 
who had been stationed near a squad made up of Germans, that 
talked altogether in the language of the Fatherland, broke in 
with 

" Out there by post numbah foahteen, where I wuz yester- 
day, there's a lot of Yanks who jest jabbered away all the hull 
time, and I hope I may never see the back of my neck ef I 
could understand ary word they said. Are them the regular 
blue-belly kind?" 

The old gentleman entered upon the next stage of the invari- 
able routine of discussion with a Rebel : 

" Wall, what air you 'uns down heah, a-fightin' we 'uns fob ? " 

As I had answered this question several hundred times, I had 
found tlie most extinguishing reply to be to ask in return : 

" What are you'uns coming up into our country to fight 
we'uns for ? " 

Disdaining to notice this return in kind, the old man passed 
on to the next stage : 

" What are you''uns takin' ouah niggahs away from us fob ? " 

Now, if negros had been as cheap as oreoide watches, it is 
doubtful whether the speaker had ever had money enough in his 
possession at one time to buy one, and yet he talked of taking 
away " ouah niggahs," as if the}^ Avere as plenty about his place 
as hills of corn. As a rule, the more abjectly poor a Southerner 
was, the more readily he worked himself into a rage over the 
idea of " takin' away ouah niggahs." 

I replied in burlesque of his assumption of ownership : 

" W^hat are you coming up North to burn my rolling mills, 
and rob my comrade here's bank, and plunder my brother's 
store, and burn down my uncle's factories ? " 



608 i^NDERSONVlLLK. 

No reply to this counter thrust. The old man passed to tlit» 
third inevitable proposition : 

" "What air you'uns puttin' ouah niggahs in the field to fight 
we'uns foh 'i " 

Then the whole car-load shouted back at hira at once : 

"What are you'uns putting blood-hounds on our trails to 
hunt us down, for?" 

Old Man — (savagely), " Waal, ye don't think ye kin ever lick 
us; leastways sich fellers as ye air ? " 

Myself — " Well, we warmed it to you pretty lively until you 
caught us. There were none of us but wliat were doing about 
as good work as any stock you fellows could turn out. No 
Rebels in our neighborhood bad much to brag on. We are 
not a drop in the bucket, either. There's millions more better 
men than we are where we came from, and they are all 
determined to stamp out your miserable Confederacy. You've 
got to come to it, sooner or later ; you must knock under, sure 
as white blossoms make little apples. You'd better make up 
your mind to it." 

Old Man — "No, sah, nevah. Ye nevah kin conquer us I 
We're the bravest people and the best figiiters on airth. Ye 
nevah kin whip any people that's a fightin' fur their liberty* 
an' their right ; an' ye nevah can whip the South, sah, any way. 
We'll fight ye until all the men air killed, and then the wim- 
men'll fight ye, sah." 

Myself — "Well, you may think so, or you may not. From 
the way our boys are snatching the Confederacy's real estate 
away, it begins to look as if you'd not have enough to fight 
anybody on pretty soon. What's the meaning of all this forti. 
fying?" 

Old Man — " Why, don't you know ? Our folks are fixin' up 
a place foh Bill Sherman to butt his brains out agin'." 

" Bill Sherman ! " we all shouted in surprise : " Why he ain't 
within two hundred miles of this place, is he ? ' 

Old Man — "Yes, but he is, tho.' He thinks he's played a 
sharp Yankee trick on Hood. He found out he couldn't lick 
him in a squar' fight, nohow ; he'd tried that on too often ; so 
he just sneaked 'round behind him, and made a break for the 
center of the State, where he thought there was lots of good 



A STORY OF REBEL MILITARY PRISONS. 



509 



stealin' to be done. But we'll show him. We'll soon hev him 
just whar we want him, au' we'll learn him how to go traipesin' 
'round the country," stealin' niggahs, burnin' cotton, an' runnin' 
off folkses' beef critters. lie sees now the scrape he's got into, 




A ROADSIDE VIEW. 

an' he's tryin' to get to the coast, whar the gunb-oats'll help 
^•im out. But he'll nevah git thar, sah ; no sah, nevah. He's 
mouty nigh the end of his rope, sah, and we'll purty soon hev 
^im jist whar you fellows air, sah." 

Myself — "Well, if you fellows intended stopping him, why 
didn't you do it up about Atlanta? What did you let him 
come clear through the State, burning and stealing, as you say ? 
It was money in your pockets to head him off as soon as 
possible." 

Old Man — " Oh, we didn't set nothing afore him up thar 



610 



ANDKRSONVILLE. 



except Joe Brown's Pets, these sorry little Reserves ; they're 

powerful little account ; no stand-up to 'em at all ; they'd break 

their necks runnin' away ef ye so much^s bust a cap near to 'em." 

Our guai'ds, who belonged to these Reserves, instantly felt 




THE CHARLESTON <fe SAVANNAH EAILKOAD. 
(From a photograph in Harper's Weekly.) 

that the conversation had progressed farther than was profitably 
and one of them spoke up roughly ; 

" See heah, old man, you must go off ; I can't hev ye talkin' 
to these prisoners ; hits agin my awdahs. Go 'way now !" 

The old fellow moved off, but as he did he flung this Parthian 
arrow : 

" When Sherman gits down heah, he'll find somethin' different 
ft om the little snots of Reserves he ran over up about Milledge- 
viUe ; he'll find he's got to fight real soldiers." 

We could not help enjoying the rage of the guards, over the 
low estimate placed upon the fighting ability of themselves and 
comrades, and as they raved around about what they would do 
if they were only given an opportunity to go into a line of 
battle against Sherman, we added fuel to the flames of their 
anger by confiding to each other that we always " knew that 



A 8T0BY OF REBEL MILITABT PKI80NS. 



511 



little Brats whose highest ambition was to murder a defense- 
less prisoner, could be nothing else than cowards and skulkers 
in the field." 

"Yaas — sonnies," said Charlie Burroughs, of the Third 
Michigan, in that nasal Tankee drawl, that he always assumed, 







mi%M^^^' 



A BICE PLAIITATION NEOKO. 

when he wanted to say anything very cutting; "you —trundle 

— bed — soldiers — who've — never — seen — a — real — wild 

— Yankee — don't — know — how — different — they — are — 
from — the — kind — that — are — starved — down — to — 
tameness. They're — jest — as — different — as — a — Hon — in 

— a — menagerie — is — from — his — brother — in — the — 
woods — who — has — a — nigger — every — day — for — dm- 
ner. You — fellows — will — go — into — a — circus — tent — 
and — throw — tobacco — quids — m — the — face — of — the 



512 ANDEESOJSrVILLE. 

— lion — in — the — cage — when — you — haven't — spunk — 
enough — to — look — a — woodchuck — in — the — eye — if — 
you — met — him — alone. It's — lots — o' — fun — to — you 

— to — shoot — down — a — sick — and — starving — man — in 

— the — Stockade, — but — when — j^ou — see — a — Yank — 
with — a — gun — m — his — hand — your — livers — get — so 

— white — that — chalk — would — make — a — black — mark 

— on — 'em." 

A little later, a paper, which some one had gotten hold of, 
in some mysterious manner, was secretly passed to me. I read 
it as I could find opportunity, and communicated its contents 
to the rest of the boys. The most important of these was a 
flaming proclamation by Governor Joe Brown, setting forth 
that General Sherman was now traversing the State, commit- 
ting all sorts of depredations ; that he had prepared the way for 
his own destruction, and the Governor called upon all good 
citizens to rise en masse^ and assist in crushing the audacious 
invader. Bridges must be burned before and behind him, roads 
obstructed, and every inch of soil resolutely disputed. 

We enjoyed this. It showed that the Rebels were terribly 
alarmed, and we began to feel some of that confidence that 
"Sherman wiU come out aU right," which so marvelously 
animated all under his command. ' 



CHAPTEE LXYIL 

OFF TO CHARLESTON PASSINO THROUGH THB RICE 8WAMP8 — TWO. 

EXTREMES OF SOCIETY ENTRY INTO CHARLESTON LEISURELY 

WARFARE SHELLING THE CITY AT REGULAR INTERVALS WB 

CAMP IN A IIASS OF RUINS DEPARTURE FOB FLORENCE. 

The train started in a few minutes after the close of the con- 
versation with the old Georgian, and we soon came to and 
crossed the Savannah Eiver into South Carolina. The river 
was wide and apparently deep ; the tide was setting back in a 
swift, muddy current ; the crazy old bridge creaked and shook, 
and the grinding axles shrieked in the dry journals, as we 
pulled across. It looked very much at times as if we were to 
all crash down into the turbid flood — and we did not care very 
much if we did, if we were not going to be exchanged. 

The road lay through the tide swamp region of South Caro- 
lina, a peculiar and interesting country. Though swamps and 
fens stretched in all directions as far as the eye could reach, the 
landscape was more gratef id to the eye than the famine-stricken, 
pine-barrens of Georgia, which had become wearisome to 
the sight. The soil where it appeared, was rich, vegetation 
was luxuriant ; great clumps of laurel showed glossy richness 
in the greenness of its verdure, that reminded us of the fresh 
color of the vegetation of our Northern homes, so different 
from the parched and impoverished look of Georgian foliage. 
Immense flocks of wild fowl fluttered around us ; the Georgian 
woods were almost destitute of hving creatures ; the evergreen 
live-oak, with its queer festoons of Spanish moss, and the ugly 
and useless palmettos gave novelty and interest to the view. 

The rice swamps through which we were passing were the 
33 



514 



ANDEK80N VIJLLBk 



princely possessions of the few nabobs who before the war stood 
at the head of South Carolina aristocracy — they were South 
Carolina, in fact, as absolutely as Louis XIV. was France. In 
their hands — but a few score in number — was concentrated 
about all there was of South Carolina education, wealth, cul- 
ture, and breeding. They represented a pinchbeck imitation of 
that re(j'nne in France which was happily swept out of existence 
by the Revolution, and the destruction 
of which more than compensated for 
every drop of blood shed in those terrible 
days. Like the provincial grandea 
seigneurs of Louis XVI.'s reign, they 
were gay, dissipated and turbulent; 
" accomplished " in the superficial ac- 
quirements that made the "gentle- 
man" one hundred years ago, but are 
grotesquely out of place in this sensi- 
ble, sohd age, which demands that a 
man shall be of use, and not merely 
for show. They ran horses and fought 
cocks, dawdled through society when 
young, and intrigued in politics the rest 
of their lives, with frequent spice-work 
of duels. Esteeming personal courage 
as a supreme human virtue, and never 
wearying of prating their devotion to 
the highest standard of intrepidity, 
they never produced a General who 
was even mediocre; nor did any one ever hear of a South 
Carolina regiment gaining distinction. Regarding politics and 
the art of government as, equally with arms, their natural 
vocations, they have never given the [Nation a statesman, and 
their greatest politicians achieved eminence by advocating ideas 
which only attracted attention by their balefulness. 

StiU further resembhng the French grandes seigneurs of the 
eighteenth century, they rolled in wealth wrung from the 
laborer by reducing the rewards of his toil to the last fraction 
that would support his life and strength. The rice culture was 
immensely profitable, because they had found the secret for 




Jm 



h. RICE FIELD Oinl.. 



A BTOKY OF KEBEL, itlLITAKY PRISONS. 



515 



raising it more cheaply than even the pauper laborer of the old 
world could. Their lands had cost them nothing originally, 
the improvements of dikes and ditches were comparatively 
inexpensive, the taxes were nominal, and their slaves were not 
BO expensive to keep as good horses in the North. 

Thousands of the acres along the road belonged to the Rhetts, 



:^te- 




A EIOE SWAMP 

thousands to the Heywards, thousands to the Manigaults, 
the Lowndes, the Middletons, the Hugers, the Barnwell s, and 
the Elliots — all names too well known in the history of our 
country's sorrows. Occasionally one of their stately mansions 
could be seen on some distant elevation, surrounded by noble 
old trees, and superb grounds. Here they lived during the 
healthy part of the year, but fled thence to summer resorts 
in the highlands as the miasmatic season approached.* 

The people we saw at the stations along our route were mel- 
ancholy illustrations of the evils of the rule of such an oligarchy. 
There was no middle class visible anywhere — nothing but the 
two extremes. A man was either a "gentleman," and wore a 
white shirt and city-made clothes, or he was a loutish hind, clad 
in mere apologies for garments. We thought we had found in 
the Georgia " cracker " the lowest substratum of human society, 



616 AKDEKSONVILLB. 

but he was bright intelligence compared to the South Carolina 
"clayeater" and " sand-hiller." The "cracker" always gave 
hopes to one that if he had the advantage of common schools, 
and could be made to understand that laziness was dishonora- 
ble, he might develop into something. There was little foun- 
dation for such hope in the average low South Carolinian. Hiu 
mind was a shaking quagmire, which did not admit of the erec- 
tion of any superstructure of education upon it. The South 
Carolina guards about us did not know the name of the next 
town, though they had been raised in that section. They did 
not know how far it was there, or to any place else, and they 
did not care to learn. They had no conception of what the 
war was being waged for, and did not want to find out ; they 
did not know where their regiment was going, and did not 
remember where it had been; they could not tell how long 
they had been in service, nor the time they had enlisted for. 
They only remembered that sometimes they had had "sorter 
good times," and sometimes " they had been powerful bad/' 
and they hoped there would be plenty to eat wherever they 
went, and not too much hard marching. Then they wondered 
" whar a feller'd be likely to make a raise of a canteen of good 
whisky ? " 

Bad as the whites were, the rice plantation negros were even 
worse, if that were possible. Brought to the country centiu-ies 
ago, as brutal savages from Africa, they had learned nothing of 
Christian civilization, except that it meant endless toil, in mala- 
rious swamps, under the lash of the task-master. They wore, 
possibly, a little more clothing than their Senegambian ances- 
tors did ; they ate corn meal, yams and rice, instead of bananas, 
yams and rice, as their forefathers did, and they had learned a 
bastard, almost unintelligible, English. These were the sole 
blessings acquired by a transfer from a life of freedom in the 
jungles of the Gold Coast, to one of slavery in the swamps of 
the Combahee. 

I could not then, nor can I now, regret the downfall of a 
system of society which bore such fruits. 

Towards night a distressingly cold breeze, laden with a pene- 
trating mist, set in from the sea, and put an end to future 
observations by making us too uncomfortable to care for scenery 



A 8TOEY OF REBEL MILITARY PRISONS. 617 

or social conditions. We wanted most to devise a way to keep 
warm. Andrews and I pulled our overcoat and blanket closely 
about us, snuo^gled together so as to make each one's meager 
body afford the other as much heat as possible — and endured. 

We became fearfully hungry. It will be recollected that we 
ate the whole of the two days' rations issued to us at Black- 
shear at once, and we had received nothing since. Wo reached 
the sullen, fainting stage of great hunger, and for hours nothing 
was said by any one, except an occasional bitter execration on 
Kebels and Rebel practices. 

It was late at night when we reached Charleston. The lights 
of the City, and the apparent warmth and comfort there 
cheered us up somewhat with the hopes that we might have 
some share in them. Leaving the train, we were marched 
some distance through well-lighted streets, in which were 
plenty of people walking to and fro. There vrcre many 
stores, apparently stocked with goods, and the citizens seemed 
to be going about their business very much as was the custom 
up Korth. 

At length our head of column made a " right turn," and we 
marched away from the lighted portion of the City, to a pai't 
which I could see through the shatlows was filled with ruins. 
An almost insupportable odor of gas, escaping I suppose from 
the ruptured pipes, mingled with the cold, rasping air from the 
sea, to make every breath intensely disagreeable. 

As I saw the ruins, it flashed upon me that this was the 
bm-nt district of the city, and they were putting us under the 
fire of our own guns. At first I felt much alarmed. Little 
relish as I had on general principles, for being shot I had much 
less for being killed by our own men. Then I reflecte>l that if 
they put me there — and kept mo — a guard would have to be 
placed around us, who would necessarily be in as much danger 
as we were, and I knew I could stand any fire that a Rebel 
could. 

We were halted in a vacant lot, and sat down, only to jump 
up the next instant, as some one shouted : 

" There comes one of 'em ! " 

It was a great shell from the Swamp Angel Battery. Start- 
ing from a point miles away, where, seemingly, the sky came 



518 AJTOEKSONVILLE, 

down to tlie sea, was a narrow ribbon of fire, which slowly 
unrolled itself against the star-lit vault over our heads. On, on 
it came, and was apparently following the sky down to the 




A SCEKE IN THE " BUKNT DISTRICTS. 
(From a Photograph in Uarper's Weekly, taken immediately after the surrender of the City.) 

horizon behind us. As it reached the zenith, there came to our 
ears a prolonged, but not sharp, — 

" AYhish — ish — ish — ish — ish ! " 

We watched it breathlessly, and it seemed to be long ininuteM 
in running its course; then a thump upon the ground, and a 
vibration, told that it had struck. For a moment there wiis a 
dead silence. Then came a loud roar, and the crash of break- 
ing timber and crushing walls. The shell had bursted. 

Ten minutes later another shell followed, with like results. 
For awhile we forgot all about hunger in the excitement of 
watching the messengers from " God's country." "What happi- 
ness to be where those shells came from. Soon a Rebel battery 
of heavy guns somewhere near and in front of us, waked up, 
and began answering with dull, slow thumps that made the 
ground shudder. This continued about an hour, when it quieted 
down again, but our shells kept coming over at regular intervals 



A STOEY OF REBKL MTLITAET PRISONS. 



519 



with the same slow deliberation, the same prolonged warning, 
and the same dreadful crash when they struck. They had 
ah'eady gone on this way for over a year, and were to keep it 
up months longer until the City was captured. 

The routine was the same from day to day, month in, and 




THE PART WHERE WE LAY WAS A MASS OF RUINS. 

month out, from early in August, 1863, to the middle of April, 
1865. Every few minutes during the day our folks would hurl 
a great shell into the beleaguered City, and t'wice a day, for 
perhaps an hour each time, the Rebel batteries would talk back. 
It must have been a lesson to the Charlestonians of the persistent, 
methodical spirit of the l^orth. They prided themselves on the 
length of the time they were holding out -against the enemy, 
and the papers each day had a column headed 

" 390th DAY OF THE SIEGE," 

or 391st, 393d, etc., as the number might be since our people 
opened fire upon the City. The part where we lay was a mass 
of ruins. Many large buildings had been knocked down ; very 
many more were riddled with shot holes and tottering to their 
fall. One night a shell passed through a large budding 
about a quarter of a mile from us. It had already been struck 
several times, and was shaky. The shell went through with 
». deafening crash. All was still for an instant ; then it 



520 iLNDEKSONVILLE. 

exploded with a dull roar, followed by •more crashing of 
timber and walls. The sound died away and was succeeded by 
a moment of silence. Finally the great building fell, a shapeless 
heap of ruins, with a noise like that of a dozen field pieces. 
We wanted to cheer but restrained ourselves. This was the 
nearest to us that any sliell came. 

There was only one section of the City in reach of our guns 
and this was nearly destro3^ed. Fires had come to complete 
the work begun by the shells. Outside of the boundaries of 
this region, the people felt themselves as safe as in one of our 
northern Cities to-day. They had an abiding faith that they 
were clear out of reach of any artillery that we could mount. 
I learned afterwards from some of the prisoners, who went into 
Charleston ahead of us, and were camped on the race course 
outside of the City, that one day our fellows threw a shell 
clear over the City to this race course. There was an imme- 
diate and terrible panic among the citizens. They thought we 
had mounted some new guns of increased range, and now the 
whole city must go. But the next shell fell inside the estab- 
lished hmits, and those following were equally well behaved, so 
that the panic abated. I have never heard any explanation of 
the matter. It may have been some freak of the gun-squad, 
trying the effect of an extra charge of powder. Had our 
people known of its signal effect, they could have depopulatec 
the place in a few hours. 

The whole matter impressed me queerly. The only artillery 
I had ever seen in action were field pieces. They made an ear- 
splitting crash when they were discharged, and there was likely 
to be oceans of trouble for everybody in that neighborhood 
about that time. I reasoned from this that bigger guns made 
a proportionally greater amount of noise, and bred an infinitely 
larger quantity of trouble. 'Now I was healing the giants of 
the world's ordnance, and they were not so impressive as a 
lively battery of three-inch rifles. Their reports did not threaten 
to shatter everything, but had a dull resonance, something like 
that produced by striking an empty barrel with a wooden mauL 
Their shells did not come at one in that wildly, ferocious way, 
with which a missile from a six-pounder convinces every fellow 
in a long line of battle that he is the identical one it is meant 



A STORY OF KEBEL MILITARY PRISONS. 



521- 



for, but they meandered over in a lazy, leisurely manner, as if 
time was no object and no person Avould feel put out at having 
to wait for them. Then, the idea of firing every quarter of an 
hour for a year — fixing up a job for a life-time, as Andrews 




RUIXS OF ST. FINBAR CATHEDRAL. 



expressed it, — and of being fired back at for an hour at 9 o'clock 
every nioi"ning and evening; of fifty thousand people going on 
buying and selling, eating, drinking and sleeping, liavi ng dances, 
drives and balls, marrying and giving in marriage, all within a 
few hundred yards of where tlie shells were falling — struck 
me as a most singular method of conducting: Avarfare. 

"We received no rations until the day after our arrival, and 
then they were scanty, though fair in quality. We were by 
this time so hungry and faint that we could hardly move. "We 
did nothing for hours but lie around on the ground and try to 
forget how famished we were. At the announcement of rations, 
many acted as if crazy, and it was all that the Sergeants could 
do to restrain the impatient mob from tearing the food away 
and devouring it, when they were trying to divide it out. Yery 



522 ANDEKSONVILLE. 

many — perhaps thirty — died during the night and morning. 

No blame for this is attached to the Charlestonians. They 
distinguished themselves from the citizens of every other place 
in the Southern Confederacy where we had been, by making 
efforts to relieve our condition. They sent quite a quantity of 
food to us, and the Sisters of Charity came among us, seeking 
and ministering to the sick. I believe our experience was the 
usual one. The prisoners who passed through Charleston 
before us all spoke very higlily of the kindness shown them by 
the citizens there. 

We remained in Charleston but a few days. One night we 
were marched down to a rickety depot, and put aboard a still 
more rickety train. When morning came we found ourselves 
running northward through a pine barren country that resem- 
bled somewhat that in Georgia, except that the pine was short- 
leaved, there was more oak and other hard woods, and the 
vegetation generally assumed a more Northern look. We^ad 
been put into close box cars, with guards at the doors and on 
top. During the night quite a number of the boys, who had 
fabricated little saws out of case knives and fragments of hoop 
iron, cut holes through the bottoms of the cars, through which 
they dropped to the ground and escaped, but were mostly 
recaptured after several days. There was no hole cut in our 
car, and so Andrews and I staid in. 

J ust at dusk we came to the insignificant village of Florence, 
the junction of the road leading from Charleston to Cheraw 
with that running from Wilmington to Kingsville. It was 
about one hundred and twenty miles from Charleston, and the 
same distance from Wilmington. As our train ran through a 
cut near the junction a darky stood by the track gazing at us 
curiously. When the train had nearly passed him he started 
to run up the bank. In the imperfect light the guards mistook 
him for one of us who had jumped from the train. They all 
fired, and the unlucky negro fell, pierced by a score of bullets. 

That night we camped in the open field. When morning 
came we saw, a few hundred yards from us, a Stockade of 
rough logs, with guards stationed around it. It was another 
prison pen. They were just bringing the dead out, and two 
men were tossing the bodies up into the four-horse wagon 



A 8T0BY OF SBBEL MILITAKT PEI80N8. 



623 



which hauled them avrtiy for burial. The men were going 
about their business as coolly as if loading slaughtered hogs. 
One of them would catch the body by the feet, and the other 
by the arms. They would give it a swing — " One, two, three," 







THE UNLUCKY NEGRO FELL, PIERCKI) UV A SCORE OF BULLKT8. 

and up it would go into the wagon. This filled heaping full 
with corpses, a negro mounted tiie wheel horse, grasped the 
lines, and shouted to his animals : 

"Now, wallv off on your tails, boys." 

The horses strained, the wagon moved, and its load of whai 
were once gallant, devoted soldiers, was carted off to nameless 
graves. This was a part of the daily morning routine. 

As we stood looking at the sickeningly familiar architecture 
of the prison pen, a Seventh Indianian near me said, in tones 
of wearisome disgust : 

" Well, this Southern Confederacy is the d — dest country to 
«tand logs on end on God Almighty's footstooL" 



CHAPTER Lxyni. 

SIBST DATS AT FLOKENCE INTRODUCTION TO LIEUTENANT BA® 

EETT, THE RED-HEADED KEEPER A BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF OUB 

NEW QUARTERS WINDEr's MALIGN INFLUENCE MANIFEST. 

It did not require a very acute comprehension to understand 
that the Stocl^ade at which we were gazing was hkely to be our 
abiding place for some indelinite period in the future. 

As usual, this discovery was the death-warrant of many whose 
lives had only been prolonged by the hoping against hope that 
the movement would terminate inside our lines. When th© 
portentous palisades showed to a fatal certainty that the word 
of promise had been broken to their hearts, they gave up the 
struggle wearily, lay back on the frozen ground, and died. 

Andrews and I were not in the humor for dying just then. 
The long imprisonment, the privations of hunger, the scourging 
by the elements, the death of four out of every five of our 
number had indeed dulled and stupefied us — bred an indiffer- 
ence to our own suffering and a seeming callosity to that of 
others, but there still burned in our hearts, and in the hearts of 
every one about us, a dull, sullen, smoldering fire of hate and 
defiance toward everything Eebel, and a lust for revenge upon 
those who had showered woes upon our heads. There wa& 
little fear of death ; even the King of Terrors loses most of his 
awful character upon tolerably close acquaintance, and we had 
been on very intimate terms with him for a year now. He 
was a constant visitor, who dropped in upon us at all hours of 
the day and night, and would not be denied to any one. 

Since my entry into prison fully fifteen thousand boys had 
died around me, and in no one of them had I seen the leasi 



A STORY OF REBEL MILITARY PRISONS. 525 

dread or reluctance to go. I believe this is generally true of 
death by disease, everywhere. Our ever kindly mother, Nature, 
only makes us dread death when she desires us to preserve life. 
When she summons us hence she tenderly provides that we 
shall willingly obey the call. 

More than for anything else, Ave wanted to live now to 
triumph over the Eebels. To simply die would be of Uttle 
importance, but to die unrevenged would be fearful. If we, 
the despised, the contemned, the insulted, the starved and mal- 
treated, could Uve to come back to our oppressors as the armed 
ministers ot retribution, terrible in the remembrance of the 
wrongs of ourselves and comrades, irresistible as the agents of 
heavenly justice, and mete out to them that Biblical return of 
seven-fold of what they had measured out to us, then we would 
be content to go to death — afterwards. Ilad the thrice- 
accursed Confederacy and our malignant gaolers millions of 
lives, our great revenge would have stomach for them all. 
******** 

The December morning was gray and leaden ; dull, somber, 
snow-laden clouds swept across the sky before the soughing 
wind. 

The ground, frozen hard and stiff, cut and hurt our bare feet 
at every step ; an icy breeze drove in through the holes in ©ur 
rags, and smote our bodies like blows from sticks. The trees 
and shrubbery around were as naked and forlorn as in the ISTortli 
in the days of earl^^ Winter before the snow comes. 

Over and around us hung like a cold miasma the sickening 
odor peculia^r to Southern forests in Winter time. 

Out of the naked, repelling, unlovely earth rose the Stockade, 
in hideous ugliness. At the gate the two men continued at their 
monotonous labor of tossing the dead of the previous day into 
the wagon — heaving into that rude hearse the inanimate 
remains that had once templed gallant, manly hearts, glowing 
with patriotism and devotion to country — piling up listlessly 
and wearily, in a mass of nameless, emaciated corpses, fluttering 
with rags, and swarming with vermin, the pride, the joy of a 
hundred fair JS'orthern homes, whose light had now gone out 
forever. 

Around the prison walls shambled the guards, blanketed like 



626 ANDEKSONVILLK. 

Indians, and with faces and hearts of wolves. Other Eebels — 
also clad in dingy butternut — slouched around lazily, crouched 
over diminutive fires, and talked idle gossip in the broadest of 
"nigger" dialect. Officers swelled and strutted hither and 
thither, and negro servants loitered around, striving to spread 
the least amount of work over the greatest amount of time. 

While I stood gazing in gloomy silence at the depressing sur- 
roundings Andrews, less speculative and more practical, saw a 
good-sized pine stump near hy, which had so much of the earth 
washed away from it that it looked as if it could be readily 
pulled up. "We had had bitter experience in other prisons as to 
the value of wood, and Andrews reasoned that as we would be 
likely to have a repetition of this in the Stockade we were 
about to enter, we should make an effort to secure the stump. 
We both attacked it, and after a great deal of hard work, suc- 
ceeded in'uprooting it. It was very lucky that we did, since it 
was the greatest help in preserving our Uves throrgh the three 
long months that we remained at Florence. 

While we were arranging our stump so as to carry it to the 
best advantage, a vulgar-faced man, with fiery red hair, and 
wearing on his collar the yellow bars of a Lieutenant, approached. 
This was Lieutenant Barrett, commandant of the interior of 
the prison, and a more inhuman wretch even than Captain 
Wirz, because he had a little more brains than the commandant 
at Andersonville, and this extra intellect was wholly devoted 
to cruelty. As he came near he commanded, in loud, brutal 
tones : 

" Attention, Prisoners ! " 

We all stood up and fell in in two ranks. Said he : 

" By companies, right wheel, march / " 

This was simply preposterous. As every soldier knows, 
wheeling by companies is one of the most difficult of manuvers, 
and requires some preparation of a battahon before attempting to 
execute it. Our thousand was made up of infantry, cavalry and 
artillery, representing, perhaps, one himdred different regiments. 
We had not been divided off into companies, and were encumb- 
ered with blankets, tents, cooking utensils, wood, etc., which 
prevented our moving with such freedom as to make a company 



A BTORT OF REBEL MILITABY PRISONS. 527 

wheel, even had we been divided up into companies and drilled for 
the manuver. The attempt to obey the command was, of course, 
a ludicrous failiu'e. The Eebel officers standing near Barrett 
laughed openly at his stupidity in giving such an order, but he 
was furious. He hurled at us a torrent of the vilest abuse the 
corrupt imagination of man can conceive, and swore until he 
was fairly black in the face. He fired his revolver off over our 
heads, and shrieked and shouted until he had to stop from sheer 
exhaustion. Another officer took command then, and marched 
us into prison. 

We foand this a small copy of Anderson ville. There was a 
stream running north and south, on either side of which was a 
swamp. A Stockade of rough logs, with the bark still on, 
inclosed several acres. The front of the prison was toward the 
"West. A piece of artillery stood before the gate, and a 
platform at each corner bore a gun, elevated high enouo-h to 
rake the whole inside of the prison. A man stood behind each 
of these guns continually, so as to open with them at any 
moment. The earth was throwm up against the outside of the 
palisades in a high embankment, along the top of which the 
guards on duty walked, it being high enough to elevate their 
head, shoulders and breasts above the tops of the logs. Inside 
the i nevi table dead-line was traced by running a furrow around 
the prison — twenty feet from the Stockade — with a plow. 
In one respect it was an improvement on Anderson ville : 
regular streets were laid off, so that motion about the camp 
was possible, and cleanliness was promoted. Also, the crowd 
inside Avas not so dense as at Camp Sumter. 

The prisoners were divided into hundreds and thousands, 
with Sergeants at the heads of the divisions. A very good 
pohce force — organized and officered by the prisoners — main- 
tained order and prevented crime. Thefts and other offenses 
were punished, as at Anderson ville, by the Chief of Police sen- 
tencing the offenders to be spanked or tied up. 

We found very many of our Andersonville acquaintances 
inside, and for several days comparisons of experience -^vere in 
order. They had left Andersonville a few days after us, but 
were taken to Charleston instead of Savannah. The same 
story of exchange was dinned into their ears until they arrived 



ANDEESONVILLB. 

at Charleston, when the truth was told them, that no exchange 
was contemplated, and that they had been deceived for the 
purpose of getting them safely out of reach of Sherman. 

Still they were treated well in Charleston — better than they 
had been anywhere else. Intelligent physicians had visited the 
sick, prescribed for them, furnished them with proper medicines, 
and admitted the worst cases to the hospital, where they were 
given something of the care that one would expect in such an 
institution. Wheat bread, molasses and rice were issued to 
them, and also a few spoonfuls of vinegar, daily, which 
were very grateful to them in their scorbutic condition. The 
•citizens sent in clothing, food and vegetables. The Sisters of 
Charity were indefatigable in ministering to the sick and dying. 
Altogether, their recollections of the place were quite pleasant. 

Despite the disagreeable prominence which the City had in 
ihe Secession movement, there was a very strong Union element 
there, and many men found opportunity to do favors to the 
prisoners and reveal to them how much they abhorred Secession. 

After they had been in Charleston a fortnight or more, the 
yellow fever broke out in the City, and soon extended its 
ravages to the prisoners, quite a number dying from it. 

Early in October they had been sent away from the City to 
their present location, which was then a piece of forest land. 
There was no stockade or other enclosure about them, and one 
night they forced the guard-line, about fifteen hundred escap- 
ing, under a pretty sharp fire from the guards. After getting 
out they scattered, each group taking a different route, some 
seeking Beaufort, and other places along the seaboard, and the 
rest tr3ang to gain the mountains. The whole State was thrown 
into the greatest pertm'bation by the occurrence. The papers 
magnified the proportion of the outbreak, and lauded f ulsomely 
the gallantry of the guards in endeavoring to withstand the 
desperate assaults of the frenzied Yankees. The people were 
wrought up into the highest alarm as to outrages and excesses 
that these flying desperados might be expected to commit. 
One would think that another Grecian horse, introduced into 
the heart of the Confederate Troy, had let out its fatal band of 
armed men. All good citizens were enjoined to turn out and 
assist in arresting the runaways. The vigilance of all patrolling 



A BTORT OF EKBKL MILITARY PKI80N8. 629 

was redoubled, and such was the effectiveness of the measures 
taken that before a month nearly every one of the fugitives 
had been retaken and sent back to Florence. Few of these 
complained of any special illtreatment by their captors, while 
many reported frequent acts of kindness, especially when 
their captors belonged to the middle and upper classes. The 
low-down class — the clay-eaters — on the other hand, almost 
always abused their prisoners, and sometimes, it is pretty cer- 
tain, murdered them in cold blood. 

About this time Winder came on from Andersonville, and 
then everything changed immediately to the complexion of that 
place. He began the erection of the Stockade, and made it 
very strong. The Dead Line was established, but instead of 
being a strip of plank upon the top of low posts, as at Ander- 
sonville, it was simply a shallow trench, which was sometimes 
plainl}^ visible, and sometimes not. The guards always resolved 
matters of doubt against the prisoners, and fired on them when 
they supposed them too near where the Dead Line ought to be. 
Fifteen acres of ground were enclosed by the palisades, of which 
five were taken up by the creek and swamp, and three or four 
more by the Dead Line, main streets, etc., leaving about seven 
or eight for the actual use of the prisoners, whose number 
swelled to fifteen thousand by the arrivals from Andersonville. 
This made the crowding together nearly as bad as at the latter 
place, and for awhile the same fatal results followed. The 
mortality, and the sending away of several thousa.nd on the sick 
exchange, reduced the aggregate number at the time of our 
arrival to about eleven thousand, which gave more room to all, 
but was still not one-twentieth of the space which that number 
of men should have had. 

No shelter, nor material for constructing any, was furnished. 
The ground was rather thickly wooded, and covered with 
undergrowth, when the Stockade was built, and certainly no 
bit of soil was ever so thoroughly cleared as this was. The 
trees and brush were cut down and worked up into hut build- 
ing materials by the same slow and laborious process that I 
have described as employed in building our huts at Millen. 

Then the stumps were attacked for fuel, and with such 
persistent thoroughness that after some weeks there was cer- 
34 



630 



AKDKJiSONVlU. K. 



tainly not enouo^h Troody material left in that whole fifteen 
acres of ground to kindle a small kitchen fire. The men would 
begin work on the stump of a good sized tree, and chip and 
spht it off painfully and slowly until they had followed it 
to the extremity of the tap root ten or fifteen feet below 
the surface. The lateral roots would be followed with equal 
determination, and trenches thirty feet long, and two or three 
feet deep were dug with case-knives and half-canteens, to get a 
root as thick as one's wrist. The roots of shrubs and vines 
were followed up and gathered with similar industry. The 
cold weather and the scanty issues of wood forced men to do 
this. 







EECAPTURE OF THE KUKAWATS. 



The huts constructed were as various as the materials and the 
tastes of the builders. Those who were fortunate enough to 
get plenty of timber built such cabins as I have described at 
Millen. Those who had less eked out their materials in various 
ways. Most frequently all that a squad of three or four could 
get vTOuld be a few slender poles and some brush. Thev would 



A STORY OF KEUKL MILITAKY PK180N8. 531 

dig a hole in the ground two feet deep and large enough for 
them all to He in. Then putthig up a stick at each end and 
laying a ridge pole across, they would adjust the rest of their 
material so as to form sloping sides capable of supporting eartii 
enough to make a water-tight roof. The great majority were 
not so well off as these, and had absolutelj'' nothing of which to 
build. They had recourse to the clay 6f the swamp, from 
which they fashioned rude sun-dried bricks, and made adobe 
houses, shaped like a bee hive, which lasted very well until a 
hard rain came, when they dissolved into red mire about the 
bodies of their miserable inmates. 

Remember that all these makeshifts were practiced within a 
half-a-mile of an almost boundless forest, from which in a day's 
time the camp could have been supplied with material enough 
to give every man a comfortable hut 



lAPTEK LXIX. 

BAJERETt's TSBi 7 HOW HE PUNISHED THOSE ALLEGED TO 

BK ENGAQEL .INQ THE MI8EKT m THE 8T0CXADB 

men's limbs r WITH DRY GANGKENE. 

Winder had found in Barrett even a better tool for his cruel 

purposes than TTir .. "'' two resembled each other in many 
respects. Both we utely destitute of any talent for com- 

manding men, a,^u uouid no more handle even one thousand 
men properly than a cabin boy could navigate a great ocean 
steamer. Both were given to the same senseless fits of insane 
rage, coming and going without apparent cause, during which 
they fired revolvers and guns or threw clubs into crowds of 
prisoners, or knocked down such as were within reach of their 
fists. These exhibitions were such as an overgrown child might 
be expected to make. They did not secure any result except to 
increase the prisoners' wonder that such ill-tempered fools could 
be given any position of responsibility. 

A short time previous to our entry Barrett thought he had 
reason to suspect a tunnel. He immediately announced that no 
more rations should be issued until its whereabouts was 
revealed and the ringleaders in the ["attempt to escape 
delivered up to him. The rations at that time were very 
scanty, so that the first day they were cut off the sufferings 
were fearful. The boys thought he would surely relent the 
next day, but they did not know their man. He was not 
suffering any, why should he relax his severity ? He strolled 
leisurely out from his dinner table, picking his teeth with his 
penknife in the comfortable, self-satisfied way of a coarse man 
who has just filled his stomach to his entire content — an atti- 



▲ 8TOBY OF BEBXL MILITARY PRISONS, 



53d 



tnde and an air that was simply maddening to the famishing 
wretches, of whom he inquired tantalizingly : 

"Air ye're hungry enough to give up them G — d d — d s — s 
ofb— syet?" 

That night thirteen thousand men, craz}'-, fainting with hun- 
ger, walked hither and thither, until exhaustion forced them to 
become quiet, sat on the ground and pressed their bowels in by 
leaning against sticks of wood laid across their thighs ; trooped 
to the Creek and drank water until their 
gorges rose and they could swallow no 
more — did everything in fact that imagina- 
tion could suggest — to assuage the pangs 
of the deadly gnawing that was consuming 
their vitals. All the cruelties of the terrible 
Spanish Inquisition, if heaped together, 
would not sum up a greater aggregate of 
anguish than was endured by them. The 
third day came, and still no signs of yielding 
by Barrett. The Sergeants counseled together. 
Something must be done. The fellow would 
starve the whole camp to death with as 
little compunction as one drowns blind pup- 
pies. It was necessary to get up a tunnel to 
(From a Photo taken after show Barrett, and to get boys who would 

his arrival at Annapolie.) „ j i • i i • , i i . 

confess to being leaders m the work. A 
number of gallant fellows volunteered to brave his wrath, and 
save the rest of their comrades. It required high courage to do 
this, as there was no question but that the punishment meted out 
would be as fearful as the cruel mind of the fellow could con- 
ceive. The Sergeants decided that four would be sufficient to 
answer the purpose ; they selected these by lot, marched them 
to the gate and delivered them over to Barrett, who thereupon 
ordered the rations to be sent in. lie was considerate enough, 
too, to feed the men he was going to torture. 

The starving men in the Stockade could not wait after the 
rations were issued to cook them, but in many instances mixed 
the meal up with water, and swallowed it raw. Frequently 
their stomachs, irritated by the long fast, rejected the mess; 
any ver}'' many had reached the stage when they loathed food ; 




OORPOKAL J. H. MATTHEWS, 

Oo. F, Fourth Pennsylvania, 



584 A1TOEKS0N7ILLE. 

^ burning fever was consuming them, and seething their brains 
with delirium. Hundreds died within a few days, and hundreds 
more were so debilitated by the terrible strain that they did not 
linger long afterward. 

The bo3's who had offered themselves as a sacrifice for the 
rc^st were put into a guard house, and kept over night that Bar- 
i-ett might make a day of the amusement of torturing them. 
Alter he had laid in a hearty breakfast, and doubtless fortified 
himself with some of the villainous sorgum whisky, which the 
llebels were now reduced to drinking, he set about his enter- 
tainment. 

The devoted four were brought out — one by one — and their 
hands tied together beliind their backs. Then a noose of a slen- 
der, strong hemp rope was slipped over the first one's thumbs 
and drawn tight, after which the rope was thrown over a log 
projecting from the roof of the guard house, and two or three 
Rebels hauled upon it until the miserable Yankee was lifted 
from the ground, and hung suspended by the thumbs, while his 
weight seemed tearing his limbs from his shoulder blades. 
The other three were treated in the same manner. 

The agony was simply excruciating. The boys were brave, 
and had resolved to stand their punishment without a groan, 
but this was too much for human endurance. Their will was 
strong, but Nature could not be denied, and they shrieked aloud 
so pitifully that a young Reserve standing near fainted. Each 
one screamed : 

" For God's sake, kill me! kill mel Shoot me if ^'^ou want 
to, but let me down from here ! " 

The only effect of this upon Barrett was to light up his brutal 
face with a leer of fiendish satisfaction. lie said to the guards 
with a gleeful wink : 

*' By God, I'll learn these Yanks to be more afeard of me 
than of the old de\il himself. They'll soon understand that 
I'm not the man to fool with. I'm old pizen, I am, when I git 
started. Jest hear 'em squeal, won't yer ? " 

Then walking from one prisoner to another, he said : 

" D — n yer skins, ye'll dig tunnels, wiU ye ? Ye'll try to git 
out, and run through the country stealin' and carryin' off 
niggers, and makin' more trouble than yer d — d necks are 



A STOEY OF EEBEL MILITAET PKI80N8. 635 

worth. I'll learn ye all about that. If I ketch ye at this sort 
of work again, d — d ef I don't kill ye ez soon ez I ketch ye." 

And so on, ad infinitum. How long the boys were kept up 
there undergoing this torture can not be said. Perhaps it was 
an hour or more. To the looker-on it seemed long hours, 
to the poor fellows themselves it was ages. "When they were 
let down at last, all fainted, and were carried away to the hos- 
pital, where they were weeks in recovering from the effects. 
Some of them were crippled for life. 

When we came into the prison there were about eleven 
thousand there. More uniformly wretched creatures I had never 
before seen. Up to the time of our departure from Anderson ville 
the constant influx of new prisoners had prevented the misery 
and wasting away of life from becoming fully realized. Though 
thousands were continually dying, thousands more of healthy, 
clean, well-clothed men were as continually coming in from the 
front, so that a large portion of those inside looked in fairly 
good condition. But now no new prisoners had come in for 
months ; the money which made such a show about the sutler 
shops of Anderson viUe had been spent ; and there was in every 
face the same look of ghastly emaciation, the same shrunken 
muscles and feeble limbs, the same lack-luster ej'es and hopeless 
countenances. 

One of the commonest of sights was to see men whose hands 
and feet were simply rotting off. The nights were frequently so 
cold that ice a quarter of an inch thick formed on the water. 
The naked frames of starving men were poorly calculated to 
withstand this frosty rigor, and thousands had their extremities 
so badly frozen as to destroy the life in those parts, and induce 
a rotting of the tissues by a dry gangrene. The rotted flesh 
frequently remained in its place for a long time — a loathsome 
but painless mass, that gradually sloughed off, leaving the sin- 
ews that passed through it to stand out like shining, white 
cords. 

While this was in some respects less terrible than the hospital 
gangrene at Anderson ville, it was more generally diffused, and 
dreadful to the last degree. The Eebel Surgeons at Florence 
did not follow the habit of those at Anderson ville, and try to 
check the disease by wholesale amputation, but simply let it run 



536 



AKDEE80N VILLB. 



its course, and thousands linall}'- carried their putrefied limbs 
through our Unes, when the Confederacy broke up in the Spring, 
to be treated by our Surgeons. 

I had been in prison but a little while when a voice called 
out from a hole in the ground, as I was passing : 

" S-a-v, Sergeant I "Won't you please take these shears and 
cut iny toes off ? " 

"AVhat?" said I, in amazement, stopping in front of the dug- 
out. 

"Just take these shears, won't you, and cut my toes off?** 
answered the inmate, an Indiana infantryman — holding up a 

pair of dull shears in 
his hand, and eleva- 
ting a foot for mo to 
look at. 

1 examined the lat- 
ter carefully. All the 
Ilesh of the toes, ex- 
cept little pads at the 
ends, had rotted off, 
leaving the bones as 
llV clean as if scraped. 
^ The httle tendons still 
TAKE THESE SHEARS AXD CUT UY TOES OFF. remained, and hel>J 

the bones to their 
places, but this seemed to hurt the rest of the feet and annoy 
the man. 

" You'd better let one of the TIebel doctors see this," I said, 
after finishing my survey, " before you conclude to have them 
off. May be they can be saved." 

« Xo ; d — d if I'm going to have any of them Eebel butchers 
fooling around me. I'd die first, and then I wouldn't," was 
the reply. " You can do it better than they can. It's just a 
little snip. Just try it." 

" I don't hke to," I replied. " I might lame you for life, and 
make you lots of trouble." 

« O, bother I what business is that of yours ? They're rm/ 
toes, and I want 'em off. They hurt me so I can't sleep. 
Come, now, take the shears and cut 'em off." 




A. STOKT OF EEBKL MIUTAST PKIS0N8. 6A9 

I yielded, ana taking the shears, snipped one tendon aftei 
•Jiother, close to the feet, and in a few seconds had the whole 
ten toes lying m a heap at the bottom of the dug-out. I picked 
them up and handed them to their owner, who gazed at them 
oomplacently, and remarked : 

"Well, I'm durned glad they're off. I won't be bothered 
with corns any more, I Hatter myself." 



CHAPTER LXX. 

HOUBE ANT) CLOTnES — EFFORTS TO EEECT A SUITABLE RESTDENOI — 
DIFP^ICDLTIES ATTENDING THIS VARIETIES OF FLORENTINE ARCHI- 
TECTURE AVAITINO FUR DEAD MEN's CLOTHES CRAVLNO FOB 

TOBACCO. 

Wq were put into the old squads to fill the places of those 
who had recently died, being assigned to these vacancies 
according to the initials of our surnames, the same rolls being 
used that we had signed as paroles. This separated Andrews 
and me, for the " A's " were taken to fill up the first hundreds of 
the First Tho^asand, while the " M's," to which I belonged, went 
into the next Thousand. 

I was put into the Second Ilundred of the Second Thousand, 
and its Sergeant dying shortly after, I was given his place, and 
commanded the Ilundred, drew its rations, made out its rolls, 
and looked out for its sick during the rest of our stay there. 

Andrews and I got together again, and began fixing up what 
little we could to protect ourselves against the weather. Cold 
as this was we decided that it was safer to endure it and risk 
frost-biting every night than to build one of the mud- walled 
and mud-covered holes that so many lived in. These were much 
warmer than lying out on the frozen ground, but we believed 
that they were very unhealthy, and that no one lived long who 
inhabited them. 

So we set about repairing our faithful old blanket — now full 
of great holes. We watched the dead men to get pieces ol 
cloth from their garments to make patchas, which we sewed on 
with yarn raveled from other fragments of w(X)len cloth. Some 
of our company, whuin we fuunW in the prison, donated us the 



A 8T0EY OF REBEL MLLriAJlT PEIBON8, 630 

three sticks necessary to make tent-poles — wonderful generosity 
•when the preciousness of firewood is remembered. . We hoisted 
om* blanket upon these ; built a wall of mud bricks at one end) 
and in it a little fireplace to economize our scanty fuel to the 
last degree, and were once more at home, and much better off 
than most of our neighbors. 

One of these, the proprietor of a hole in the ground covered 
with an arch of adobe bricks, had absolutely no bedclothes — 
except a couple of short pieces of board — and very little other 
clothing. He dug a trench in the bottom of what was by cour- 
tesy called his tent, sufficiently large to contain his body below 
his neck. At nightfall he would crawl into this, put his two 
bits of board so that they joined over his breast, and then say ; 
" 1^0 w, boys, cover me over ; " whereupon his friends would 
cover him up Avith dry sand from the sides of his domicile, in 
which he would slumber quietly till morning, when he would 
rise, shake the sand from his garments, and declare that he felt 
as well refreshed as if he had slept on a spring mattress. 

There has been much talk of earth baths of late years in sci- 
entific and medical circles. I have been sorry that our Flor- 
ence comrade — if he still fives — did not contribute the results 
of his experience. 

The pinching cold cured me of my repugnance to wearing 
dead men's clothes, or rather it made my nakedness so painful 
that I was glad to cover it as best I could, and I began forag- 
ing among the corpses for garments. For awhile my efforts to 
set myself up in the mortuary second-hand clothing business 
were not aU successful. I found that dying men with good 
clothes were as carefully watched over by sets of fellows who 
constituted themselves their residuary legatees as if they were 
men of fortune dying in the midst of a circle of expectant 
nephews and nieces. Before one was fairly cold his clothes 
would be appropriated and divided, and I have seen many 
sharp fights between contesting claimants. 

I soon perceived that my best chance was to get up very 
early in the morning, and do my hunting. The nights were so 
cold that many could not sleep, and they would walk up and 
down the streets, trying to keep warm by exercise. Towards 
morning, becoming exhausted, they would lie down on the 



wo AlfDEKSONVILLa. 

ground almost anywhere, and die. I have frequently seen at , 
many as fifty of these. My fii-st " find " of any importance \ 
was a yomig Pennsylvania Zouave, who was lying dead near 
the bridge that crossed the Creek. His clothes were all badly 
worn, except his baggy, dark trousers, which were nearly new. 
I removed these, scraped out from each of the dozens of great 
folds in the legs about a half pint of lice, and drew the gar- ; 
ments over my own haK-frozen hmbs, the first real covering | 
those members had had for four or five months. The panta- 1 
loons only came down about half-way between my knees and i 
feet, but still they were wonderfully comfortable to what I had ' 
been — or rather not been — wearing. I had picked up a pair of i 
boot bottoms, which answered me for shoes, and now I began ; 
a hunt for socks. This took several morning expeditions, but | 
on one of them I was rewarded with finding a corpse with a good i 
brown one — army make — and a few days later I got another, , 
a good, thick genuine one, knit at home, of blue yarn, by some 
patient, careful housewife. Almost the next morning I had the 
good fortune to find a dead man with a warm, whole, infantry 
dress-coat, a most serviceable garment. As I still had for a 
shirt the blouse Andrews had given me at Millen, I now con- 
sidered my wardrobe complete, and left the rest of the clothes 
to those who were more needy than I. 

Those who used tobacco seemed to suffer more from a depriva- 
tion of the weed than from lack of food. There were no 
sacrifices they would not make to obtain it, and it was no uncom- 
mon thing for boys to trade off half their rations for a chew of 
"navy plug." As long as one had anything — especiaUy 
buttons — to trade, tobacco could be procured from the guards, 
who were plentifully supplied with it. When means of barter 
were gone, chewers frequently became so desperate as to beg f 
the guards to throw them a bit of the precious nicotine. Shortly 
after our arrival at Florence, a prisoner on the East Side 
approached one of the Reserves with the request : 

" Say, Guard, can't you give a fellow a chew of tobacco ? " 

To which the guard replied : 

" Yes ; come right across the line there and I'll drop you 
down a bit." 



A SrOKY UK KKliEL MIJ.lTAkY i'RI80NS. 541. 

The ansusj)ecting prisoner stepped across the Dead Line, and 
the guard — a boy of sixteen — raised his gun and killed him. 

At the North Side of the prison, the path dovm to the Creek 
lay right along side of the Dead Line, which was a mere furrow 
m the ground. At night the guards, in their zeal to kill some- 
body, were very likely to imagine that any one going along the 
path for water was across the Dead Line, and fire upon him. 
It was as bad as going upon the skirmish line to go for water 
after nightfall. Yet every night a group of boys would be 
found standing at the head of the path crying out : 

" Fill your buckets for a chew of tobacco." 

That is, they were wilHng to take all the risk of nmniiig that 
gauntlet for this moderate compensation. 



CHAPTEK LXXL 

DECEMBER RATIONS OF WOOD AND FOOD GROW LESS DAILY WS-lf 

CERTAINTY AS TO THE MORTALITY AT FLORENCE EVEN THE GOV. 

ERNMENT's STATISTICS ARE VERY DEFICIENT CARE FOR THli 

SICK. Is 

j 

The rations of wood grew smaller as the weather grew 
colder, until at last they settled down to a piece about the size 
of a kitchen rolling-pin per day for each man. This had to 
serve for all purposes — cooking, as well as warming. "We spKt 
the rations up into slips about the size of a carpenter's lead 
pencil, and used them parsimoniously, never building a fire so 
big that it could not be covered with a half -peck measure. "We 
hovered closely over this — covering it, in fact, with our hands 
and bodies, so that not a particle of heat was lost. Remem- 
\ bering the Indian's sage remark, " That the white man built a| 
big fire and sat away off from it ; the Indian made a little fire 
and got up close to it," we let nothing in the way of caloric be 
wasted by distance. The pitch-pine produced great quantities 
of soot, which, in cold and rainy days, when we hung over the 
fires all the time, blackened our faces until we were beyond the 
recognition of intimate friends. 

There was the same economy of fuel in cooldng. Less than! 
half as much as is contained in a penny bunch of kindling was 
made to suflBce in preparing our daily meal. If we cooked 
mush we elevated our little can an inch from the ground upon 
a chunk of clay, and piled the Httle sticks around it so carefully 
that none should burn without yielding aU its heat to the 
vessel, and not one more was burned than absolutely necessary. 
If we baked bread we spread the dough upon our chess-board, 



A 8TOBT OF RKBEL MTLITABT P&I80NS. 54S 

and propped it up before the little fire-place, and used every 
particle of heat evolved. "We had to pinch and starve ourselves 
thus, while within five minutes' walk from the prison-gate 
stood enough timber to build a great city. 

The stump Andrews and I had the foresight to secure now 
did us excellent service. It was pitch pine, very fat with resin, 
and a httle piece spUt off each day added much to our fires and 
our comfort. 

One morning, upon examining the pockets of an infantryman 
of my hundred who had just died, I had the wonderful luck to 
find a silver quarter. I hurried off to tell Andrews of our 
unexpected good fortune. By an effort he succeeded in calm- 
ing himself to the point of receiving the news with philosophic 
coolness, and we went into Committee of the Whole Upon 
the State of Our Stomachs, to consider how the money could be 
spent to the best advantage. At the south side of the Stockade 
on the outside of the timbers, was a sutler shop, kept by a 
Kebel, and communicating with the prison by a hole two or 
three feet square, cut through the logs. The Dead Line was 
broken at this point, so as to permit prisoners to come up to 
the hole to trade. The articles for sale were corn meal and 
bread, flour and wheat bread, meat, beans, molasses, honey, 
sweet potatos, etc. I went down to the place, carefully inspected 
the stock, priced everything there, and studied the relative food 
Yalue of each. I came back, reported my observations and 
conclusions to Andrews, and then staid at the tent while he 
went on a similar errand. The consideration of the matter was 
continued during the day and night, and the next morning 
we determined upon investing our twenty-five cents in sweet 
potatos, as we could get nearly a half-bushel of them, which 
was " more filhn' at the price," to use the words of Dickens's 
Fat Boy, than anything else offered us. We bought the pota- 
tos, carried them home in our blanket, buried them in the 
bottom of our tent, to keep them from being stolen, and 
restricted ourselves to two per day until we had eaten them all. 

The Eebels did something more towards properly caring for 
the sick than at Anderson ville. A hospital was established in 
the northwestern corner of the Stockade, and separated from 
the rest of the camp by a line of police, composed of our own 



&44: UTDKBaONYILLK. 

men. In this space severjd large sheds were erected, of thai 
rude architecture common to the coarser sort of buildings in 
the South. There was not a nail or a bolt used in their entire 
construction. Forked posts at the ends and sides supported 
poles upon which were laid the long " shakes," or split shingles, 
forming the roofs, and which were held in place by other poles 
laid upon them. The sides and ends were enclosed by similar 
"shakes," and altogether they formed quite a fair protection 
against the weather. Beds of pine leaves were provided for 
the sick, and some coverlets, which our Sanitary Commission 
had been allowed to send through. But nothing was done to 
bathe or cleanse them, or to exchange their lice-infested gar- 
ments for others less full of torture. The long tangled hair 
and whiskers were not cut, nor indeed were any of the cona- 
monest auggestions for the improvement of the condition of 
the sick put into execution. Men who had laid in their mud 
hovels until they had become helpless and hopeless, wer© 
admitted to the hospital, usually only to die. 

The diseases were different in character from those which 
swept off the prisoners at Andersonville. There they were 
mostly of the digestive organs ; here of the respiratory. The 
filthy, putrid, speedily fatal gangrene of Andersonville became 
here a dr}-^, slow wasting away of the parts, which continued 
for weeks, even months, without being necessarily fatal. Men's 
feet and legs, and less frequently their hands and arms, 
decayed and sloughed off. The parts became so dead that a 
knife coukl be run through them without causing a particle of 
pain. The dead flesh hung on to the bones and tendons long 
alter the nerves and veins had ceased to perform their functions, 
and sometimes startled one by dropping off in a lump, without 
causing pain or hemorrhage. 

The appearance of these was, of course, frightful, or would 
have been, had we not become accustomed to them. The spec- 
tacle of men with their feet and legs a mass of dry ulceration, 
which had reduced the flesh to putrescent deadness, and left the 
tendons standing out like cords, was too common to excite 
remark or even attention. Unless the victim was a comrade, 
no one s])ecially heeded his condition. Lung diseases and low 
fevers ravaged the camp, existing all the time in a more or less 



A STOKY OF REBEL MFLITABY PKI80N8. 



545 



virulent condition, according to the changes of the -weather? 
and occasionally raging in destructive epidemics. I am unable 
to speak with any degree of deliniteness as to the death rate, 
since I had (leased to interest myself about the number dying 

each day. I 
had now been 



a prisoner a 




year, 



and had 



become so tor- 
pid and stupe- 
fied, mentally 
and physically, 
that I cared 
comparatively 
little for any- 
thing save the 
rations of food 
and of fuel. 
The difference 
of a few spoon- 
fuls of meal, or 
a large splin- 
ter of wood in the daily issues to me, were of more actual 
importance than the increase or decrease of the death rate by a 
half a score or more. At Andersonville I frequently took the 
trouble to count the number of dead and living, but all curi- 
osity of this kind had now died out. 

Kor can I find that anybody else is in possession of much 
more than my own information on the subject. Inquiry at the 
War Department has elicited the following letters : 



CORPORAL .TOnN^ W. JAyrUATtY, 

Co. B, Fourteenth Illinoi* Cavalry. 

(VroTCi a photograph taken after his arrival at Annapolia.) 



The prison records of Florence, S. C, bave never come to 
light, and therefore the number of prisoners confined there could 
not be ascertained from the records on file in this office ; nor 
do I think that any statement pur})orting to show that number 
has ever been made. 

In the report to Congress of March 1, 18G9, it was shown from 
records as f oUows : 

35 



54b ANDEKSO:s;VILLh-. 

Escaped, fifty-eight ; paroled, one ; died, two Ihousaiu! seven 
hundred and ninety-three. Total, two thousand eight hundred 
and fifty-two. 

Since date of said report there have been added to the records 
as follows : 

Died, two hundred and twelve ; enlisted in Ecbel army, three 
hundred and twenty-six. Total, five hundred and thirty-eight. 

Making a total disposed of from there, as shown by records 
on file, of three thousand three hundred and ninety. 

This, no doubt, is a small proportion of the number actually 
confined there. 

The Ilospital register on file contains that part only of the 
alphabet subsequent to, and including part of fhe letter S, but 
from this register, it is shown that the prisoners were arranged 
in hundreds and thousands, and the hundred and thousand to 
which he belonged is recorded opposite each man's name on 
said register. Thus : 

"John Jones, 11th thousand, 10th hundred." 

Eleven thousand being the highest number thus recorded, it 
is fair to presume that not less than that number were confined 
there on a certain date, and that more than that number were 
confined there during the time it was continued as a prison. 

II. 
Statement showing the whole number of Federals and Con- 
federates captured, (less the number paroled on the field), the 
number who died while prisoners, and the percentage of deaths, 
1861-1865 : 

PEDERAX.B. 

Captured 187,318 

Died, (as shown by prison and hospital records on file) 30.674 

Percentage of deaths 16.375 

C0NPBDKBATE8. 

Captured _ 227,570 

Died — 20,774 

Percentage of deaths 11.763 

In the detailed statement prepared for Congress dated March 
1, 1869, the whole number of deaths given as shown by Pris- 
oner of War records was twenty-six thousand three hundred 
and twenty-eight, but since that date evidence of three thousand 
six hundred and twenty-eight additional deaths has been 
obtained from the captured Confederate records, making a total 



A^ STORY OF REBEL MILITAKY PRISONS. 547 

of twenty-nine thousand nine hundred and fifty-six as above 
ihown. This is believed to be many thousands less than the 
actual number of Federal prisoners who died in Confederate 
prisons, as we have no records from those at Montgomery, 
Ala., Mobile, Ala., Millen, Ga., Marietta, Ga., Atlanta, Ga., 
Charleston, S. C, and others. The records of Florence, S. C, 
and Salisbury, N. C, are very incomplete. It also appears from 
Confederate inspection reports of Confederate prisons that a 
large percentage of the deaths occurred in prison quarters, 
"without the care or knowledge of the Surgeon. For the month 
of December, 1864 alone, the Confederate " burial report " at 
Salisbury, N. C, show that out of eleven hundred and fifteen 
deaths, two hundred and twenty-three, or twenty per cent., died 
in prison quarters and are not accounted for in the report of the 
Surgeon, and therefore not taken into consideration in the above 
report, as the only records of said prisons on file (with one 
exception) are the Hospital records. Calculating the percentage 
of deaths on this basis would give the number of deaths at 
thirty-seven thousand four hundred and forty-five and percent- 
age of deaths at 20.023. 

[End of the Letters from the War Department.] 

If we assume that the Government's records of Florence are 
correct, it will be apparent that one man in every three died 
there, since, while there might have been as high as fifteen 
thousand at one time in the prison, during the last three months 
of its existence I am quite sure that the number did not exceed 
seven thousand. This would make the mortality much greater 
than at Andersonville, VT'hich it undoubtedly was, since the 
physical condition of the prisoners confined there had been 
greatly depressed by their long confinement, while the bulk of 
the prisoners at Andersonville were those who had been brought 
thither directly from the field. I think also that all who 
experienced confinement in the two places are united in pro- 
nouncing Florence to be, on the whole, much the worse place, 
and more fatal to life. 

The medicines furnished the sick were quite simple in nature, 
and mainly composed of indigenous substances. For diarrhea, 
red pepper and decoctions of blackberry root and of pine leaves 
were given. For coughs and lung diseases, a decoction of wild 



548 



AJ!JDEKSONVlLLE. 



cherry bark was administered. Chills and fever were treated 
with decoctions of dogwood bark, and fever patients who 
craved something sour, were given a weak acid di'ink, made by 
ferlnenting a small quantity of meal in a barrel of water. All 
these remedies were quite good in their way, and would have 
benefited the patients had they been accompanied by proper 
shelter, food and clothing. But it was idle to attempt to arrest 
with blackberry root the diarrhea, or with wild cherry bark 
the consumption of a man lying in a cold, damp, mud hovel, 
devoured by vermin, and struggling to maintain life upon lesa ' 
than a pint of un salted corn meal per diem. 

Finding that the doctors issued red pepper for diarrhea, and 
an imitation of sweet oil made from peanuts, for the gangrenous 
sores above described, I reported to them an imaginary comrade 

in my tent, whose sjrmptoms 
indicated those remedies, and 
succeeded in drawing a small 
quantity of each, two or three 
times a week. The red pepper 
I used to warm up our bread 
and mush, and give some differ- 
ent taste to the coi-n meal, which 
had now become so loathsome 
to us. The peanut oil served to 
give a hint of the animal food 
we hungered for. It was greasy, 
and as we did not have any 
meat for three months, even this 
flimsy substitute was inexpress- 
ibly grateful to palate and stom- 
ach. But one morning the Hos- 
pital Steward made a mistake, 
and gave me castor oil instead, 
and the consequences were un- 
pleasant. 

A more agreeable remem- 
brance is that of two small apples, 
about the size of walnuts, given me by a boy named Henry 
Clay Montague Porter, of the Sixteenth Connecticut. He had 





-r^^:^^ 



CORPORAL CAI/VTN BATES. 

Ccnnpany E, Twenluth Maine. 

[From a photograph taken after his arrival at 
Annapolis ] 



A BTOBY OF KEBEL MILJTAK\ I'KlaOiNS. 549 

relatives living in North Carolina, who sent him a small package 
of eatables, out of which, in the fulness of his generous heart, 
he gave me this share — enough to make me always remember 
him with kindness. 

Speaking of eatables reminds me of an incident. Joe Dar- 
ling, of the First Maine, our Chief of Police, had a sister living 
at Augusta^ Ga., who occasionally came to Florence with a 
bausket of food and other necessaries for her brother. On one 
of these journeys, while sitting in Colonel Iverson's tent, wait- 
ing for her brother to be brought out of prison, she picked out 
of her basket a nicely browned doughnut and handed it to the 
guard pacing in front of the tent, with : 

" Here, guard, wouldn't you like a genuine Yankee dough- 
nut ? " 

The guard — a lank, loose-jointed Georgia cracker — who had 
in all his life seen very little more inviting food than the hog> 
hominy and molasses, upon which he had been raised, took the 
cake, turned it over and inspected it curiously for some time, 
without apparently getting the least idea of what it was or was 
for, and then handed it back to the donor, saying : 

** Really, mum, I don't believe I've got any use for it." 



CHAPTEE LXXIL 

DULL WINTER DATS TOO WEAK AND TOO BTUPID TO AMUSE OUB- 

SELVES — ATTEMPTS OF THE REBELS TO RECRUTT US INTO THKIB 

ARMY THE CLASS OF MEN THEY OBTAINED — VENGEANCE OH 

"the galvanized" A SINGULAR EXPERIENCE RARE GLIMP8M 

OF FUN LNiU3ILITY OF THE REBELS TO COUNT. 

The Rebels continued their efforts to induce prisoners to 
enlist in their army, and with much better success than at any 
previous time. Many men had become so desperate that they 
were reckless as to what they did. Home, relatives, friends, 
happiness — all they had remembered or looked forward to, all 
that had nerved them up to endure the present and brave the 
future — now seemed separated from them forever by a yawn- 
ing and impassable chasm. For many weeks no new prisoners 
had come in to rouse their drooping corn-age wdth news of the 
progress of our arms towards final victory, or refresh their 
remembrances of home, and the gladsomeness of " God's Coun- 
try." Before them they saw nothing but weeks of slow and 
painful progress towards bitter death. The other alternative 
was enlistment in the Rebel army. 

Another class went out and joined, with no other intention 
than to escape at the first opportunity. They justified their 
bad faith to the Rebels by recalling the numberless instances of 
the Rebels' bad faith to us, and usually closed their argumenta 
in defense of their course "with : 

" Ko oath administered by a Rebel can have any binding 
obligation. These men are outlaws who have not only broken 
their oaths to the Government, but who have deserted from ita 
service, and turned its arms against it. They are perjurers and 



I 



▲ 8T0BT OF liEBEL MILITAKY I'KliJOJNS. 551 

traitors, and in addition, the oath they administer to us is 
under compulsion and for that reason is of no account." 

Still another class, mostly made up from the old Raider 
crowd, enlisted from natural depravity. They went out more 
than for anything else because their hearts were prone to evil, 
and they did that which was wrong in preference to what was 
right. 13y far the largest portion of those the Eebels obtained 
were of this class, and a more worthless crowd of soldiers has 
not been seen since Falstaff mustered his famous recruits. 

After all, however, the number who deserted their flag was 
astonishingly small, considering all the circumstances. The 
official report sa^^s three hundred and twenty-six, but I imagine 
this is under the truth, since quite a number were turned 
back in after their utter uselessness had been demonstrated. I 
suppose that five hundred " galvanized," as we termed it, but 
this was very few when the hopelessness of exchange, the despair 
of life, and the wretchedness of the condition of the eleven or 
twelve thousand inside the Stockade is remembered. 

The motives actuating men to desert were not closely 
analyzed by us, but we held all who did so as despicable scoun- 
drels, too vile to be adequately described in words. It was not 
safe for a man to announce his intention of " g^vanizing," for 
he incurred much danger of being beaten until he was physi- 
cally unable to reach the gate. Those who went over to the 
enemy had to use great discretion in letting the Eebel officers 
know so much of their wishes as would secure their being taken 
outside. Men were frequently knocked down and dragged 
away while telling the officers they wanted to go out. 

On one occasion one hundred or more of the Raider crowd, 
who had galvanized, were stopped for a few hours in some little 
Town, on their way to the front. They lost no time in steal- 
ing everything they could lay their hands upon, and the 
disgusted Rebel commander ordered them to be returned to 
the Stockade. They came in in the evening, all well rigged out 
in Rebel uniforms, and carrying blankets. We chose to con- 
sider their good clothes and equipments an aggravation of their 
offense and an insult to ourselves. We had at that time quite a 
squad of negro soldiers inside with us. Among them was a gigan- 
tic fellow with a fist like a wooden beetle. Some of the white 



boys resolved to use these to "svreak the camp's displeasure on 
the Galvanized. The plan was carried out capitally. The big 
dai-ky, followed by a crowd of smaller and nimbler " shades," 
would approach one of the leaders among them with 

" Is you a Galvanized ? " 

The surly reply would be, 

" Yes, you black . What the business is that 

of yours ? " 

At that instant the bony fist of the darky, descending like a 
pile-driver, would catch the recreant under the ear, and lift him 
about a rod. As he fell, the smaller darkies would pounce upon 
him, and in an instant despoil him of his blanket and perhaps 
the larger portion of his warm cloLliing. The opei'ation was 
repeated with a dozen or more. The whole camp enjoyed it as 
rare fun, and it was the only time that I saw nearly every bod^' 
at Florence laugh. 

A few prisoners were brought in in December, who had been 
taken in Foster's attempt to cut the Charleston S: Savannah 
Railroad at Pocataligo. Among tliem we were astonished to 
find Charley llirsch, a member of Company K of our battalion. 
He had had a strange experience. He was originally a mem- 
ber of a Texas regiment and was captured at Arkansas Post. 
He then tooii' the oath of allegiance and enlisted with us. 
While we were at Savannah he approached a guard one day to 
trade for tobacco. The moment he spolce to the man he recog. 
nized him as a former comrade in the Texas regiment. The 
latter knew him also, and sang out, 

" I know you ; you're Charley llirsch, that used to be in my 
company." 

Charley backed into the crowd as quicldy as possible, to elude 
the fellow's eyes, but the latter called for the Corporal of the 
Guard, had himself relieved, and in a few minutes came in with 
an officer in search of the deserter, lie found him Avith Httle 
difficulty, and took him out. The luckless Charley was tried 
by court martial, found guilty, sentenced to be shot, and while 
waiting execution was confined in the jail. Before the sentence 
could be carried into effect Sherman came so close to the City 
that it was thought best to remove the prisoners. In the con- 
fusion Charley managed to make his escape, and at the moment 



▲ tiTOliir OF UEJiEL MILITAKY IMtlSONS. 653 

,a 

the battle of Pocatnligo opened, was lying concealed between 
the two lines of battle, without knowing, of course, that he was 
in such a dangerous locality. After the firing opened, ho 
thought it better to lie still than run the risk from the lire of 
both sides, especially as he momentarily expected our folks to 
advance and drive the Ilebels away. But the reverse ha{> 
pened; the Johnnies drove our fellows, and, finding Charley 
in his place of concealment, took him for one of Foster's men, 
and sent him to Florence, where he staid until we went through 
to our lines. 

Our days went by as stupidly and eventless as can be con- 
ceived. We had grown too spiritless and lethargic to dig tun- 
nels or plan escapes. We had nothing to read, nothing to 
make or destroy, nothing to work with, nothing to play with, 
and even no desire to contrive anything for aumsenient. All 
the cards in the prison were worn out long ago. Some of the 
boys had made dominos from bones, and Andrews and I still 
had our chessmen, but we were too listless to play. The mind, 
enfeebled by the long disuse of it except in a few limited chan. 
nels, was unfitted for even so much efl'ort as was involved in a 
game for pastime. 

Nor were there any physical exercises, such as that crowd of 
young men would have delighted in under other circumstances. 
There was no running, boxing, jumping, wrestling, leaping, etc. 
All were too weak and hungry to make any exertion beyond • 
that absolutely necessary. On cold days everybody seemed 
totally benumbed. The camp would be silent and still. Little 
groups everywhere hovered for hours, moody and sullen, over 
diminutive, flickering fires, made with one poor handful of 
splinters. When the sun shone, more activity was visible. 
Boys wandered around, hunted up their friends, and saw 
what gaps death — always busiest during the cold spells — had 
made in the ranks of their acquaintances. During the 
warmest part of the day everybody disrobed, and spent an 
hour or more killing the lice that had waxed and mul- 
tiphed to grievous proportions during the few days of comparar 
tive immunity. 

Besides the whipping of the Galvanized by the darkies, I 
remember but two other bits of amusement we had while at 



Florence. One of these was in hearing the colored soldiers 
sing patriotic songs, which they did with great gusto when the 
weather became mild. The other was the antics of a circus 
clown — a member, I believe, of a Connecticut or a New York 
regiment, who, on the rare occasions when we were feeling not 
exactly well so much as simply better than we had been, would 
give us an hour or two of recitations of the drolleries with, 
which he was wont to set the crowded canvas in a roar. One 
of his happiest efl'orts, I remember, was a stilted paraphrase of 
" Old Uncle Ned," a song very popular a quarter of a century 
ago, and which ran something like this : 

There was an old darky, an' his name was Uncle Xed, 

But he died long ago, long ago ; 
He had no wool on de top of his head, 

De place whar de wool ought to grow, 
cfioiros : 

Den lay down de shubbel an' de hoe, 
Den hang np de fiddle an' de bow ; 

For dere's no more hard work for poor Uncle Ned ; 
He's gone whar de good niggahs go. 

His fingers war long, like de cane in de brake, 

And his eyes war too dim for to eeo ; 
ne had no teeth to eat de corn cake. 

So he had to let de corn cake be. 



His legs were 60 bowed dat he couldn't lie gtlTl, 

An' he had no nails on his toes ; 
His neck was so crooked dat he couldn't take a pill. 

So he had to take a pill through his nose. 

CH0RU8, 

One cold frosty morning old Uncle Ned died, 
An' de tears ran down massa's cheek like rain. 

For he knew when Uncle Ned was laid in de g^oon'. 
He would never eee poor Uncle Ned again. 



In the hands of this artist the song became — 

There was an aged and Indigent African whose cognomen was Uncle Edwara, 

But he Ib deceased since a remote period, a very remote period ; 

He possessed no capillary substance on the summit of his cranium. 

The place deBignuted by kind Nature for the capillary substance to vegetate. 



i 



Then let the agricultural implements rest recumbent apon the gronod ; 
And BUBpend the musical instruments in peace upon the wall, 
For there's no more physical energy to be displayed by our indigent Uncle Ed.w*id» 
He has departed to that place set apart by a beneficent Providence for the teceptiam 
of the better daas of Africans, 



A STORY OF REBEL MILITARY PRISONS. 655 

And so on. These rare flashes of fun only served to throw the 
underlj^ng misery out in greater relief. It was like lightning 
playing across the surface of a dreary morass. 

I liave before alluded several times to the general inability of 
Rebels to count accurately, even in low numbers. One con- 
tinually met phases of this that seemed simply incomprehensible 
to us, who had taken in the multiplication table almost with 
our mother's milk, and knew the Rule of Three as well as a 
Presbyterian boy does the Shorter Catechism. A cadet — an 
undergraduate of the South Carolina Military Institute — called 
our roll at Florence, and though an inborn young aristocrat, 
who believed himself made of iiner clay than most mortals, he 
was not a bad fellow at all. He thought South Carolina aris- 
tocracy the finest gentry, and the South Carolina Military 
Institute the greatest institution of learning in the world ; but 
that is common with all South Carolinians. 

One day he came in so full of some matter of rare importance 
that we became somewhat excited as to its nature. Dismissing 
our hundred after roll-call, he unburdened his mind : 

" Now you fellers are all so d — d peart on mathematics, and 
such things, that you want to snap me up on every opportunity, 
but I guess I've got something this time that'll settle you. Its 
something that a fellow gave out yesterday, and Colonel Iver- 
son, and all the officers out there have been figuring on it ever 
since, and none have got the right answer, and I'm powerful 
sure that none of you, smart as you think you are, can do it." 

" Heavens, and earth, let's hear this wonderful problem,"said 
we all. 

"Well," said he, " what is the length of a pole standing in a 
river, one-fifth of which is in the mud, two-thirds in the water, 
and one-eighth above the water, while one foot and three inches 
of the top is broken off ? " 

In a minute a dozen answered, 

" One hundred and fifty feet." 

The cadet could only look his amazement at tiie possession oi 
such an amount of learning by a crowd of mudsills, and one of 
our fellows said contemptuously : 

" Why, if you South Carolina Institute fellows couldn't answer 



such questions as that they wouldn't alloTV you in the infant 
class up North." 

Lieutenant Barrett, our red-headed tormentor, could not, for 
the hfe of him, count those inside in "hundreds and thousands in 
such a manner as to be reasonably certain of correctness. As 
it would have cankered his soul to feel that he was being beaten 
out of a half-dozen rations by the superior cunning of the 
Yankees, he adopted a plan which he must have learned at 
some period of his life when he was a hog or sheep drover. 
Every Sunday morning all in the camp were driven across the 
Creek to the East Side, and then made to file slowly back — 
one at a time — between two guards stationed on the little 
bridge that spanned the Creek. By this means, if he was able 
to count up to one hundred, he could get our number correctly. 

The first time this was done after our arrival he gave us a 
display of his wanton malevolence. "We were nearly all assem- 
bled on the East Side, and were standing in ranks, at the edge 
of the swamp, facing the west. Barrett was walking along the 
opposite edge of the swamp, and, coming to a little gully> 
jumped it. lie was very awkward, and came near falling into 
the mud. We all yelled derisively. lie turned toward us in 
a fury, shook his fist, and shouted curses and imprecations. "We 
yeUed still louder. He snatched out his revolver, and began 
firing at our line. The distance was considerable — say four or 
five hundred feet — and the bullets struck in the mud in advance 
of the line. We still yeUed. Then he jerked a gun from a 
guard and fired, but his aim was still bad, and the bullet sang 
over our heads, striking in the bank above us. He posted off 
to get another gun, but his fit subsided before he obtained it. 



CHAPTEE LXXni. 

0HEISTMA8 AND THE WAT IT WAS PASSED THE DAILY EOUTrNTJ OT 

RATION DKAWENG SOME PECULIARITIES OF LIVINO AND DYINO. 

• Christmas, with its swelling flood of happy memories, — mem- 
ories now bitter because they marked the high tide whence our 
fortunes had receded to this despicable state — came, but brought 
no change to mark its coming. It is true that we had expected no 
change ; we had not looked forward to the day, and hardly 
knew when it arrived, so indifferent were we to the lapse of 
time. 

When reminded that the day was one that in all Christendom 
was sacred to good cheer and joyful meetings ; that wherever 
the upraised cross proclaimed followers of Him who preached 
" Peace on Earth and good will to men," parents and children, 
brothers and sisters, long-time friends, and all congenial spirits 
were gathering around hospitable boards to delight in each 
other's society, and strengthen the bonds of unity between 
them, we listened as to a tale told of some foreign land from 
which we had parted forever more. 

It seemed years since we had known anything of the kinc' 
The experience we had had of it belonged to the dim and irre^ 
vocable past. It could not come to us again, nor we go to it. 
Squalor, hunger, cold and wasting disease had become the 
ordinary conditions of existence, from which there was little 
hope that we would ever be exempt. 

Perhaps it was well, to a certain degree, that we felt so. It 
softened the poignancy of our reflections over the difference in 
the condition of ourselves and our happier comrades who were 
elsewhere. 



OOO AITOERSONVILLB. 

The weather was in harmony with our feelings. The dull, 
gray, leaden sky was as sharp a contrast with the crisp, bracing 
sharpness of a Northern Christmas morning, as our beggarly 
little ration of saltless corn meal was to the sumptuous cheer that 
loaded the dinner-tables of our Northern homes. 

"We turned out languidly in the morning to roll-call, endured 
silently the raving abuse of the cowardly brute Barrett, hung 
stupidly over the flickering little fires, until the gates opened to 
admit the rations. For an hour there was bustle and animation. 
All stood around and counted each sack of meal, to get an idea 
of the rations we were hkely to receive. 

This was a daily custom. The number intended for the day's 
issue were all brought in and piled up in the street. Then there 
was a division of the sacks to the thousands, the Sersreant of 
each being called up in turn, and allowed to pick out and carry 
away one, until all were taken. When we entered the 
prison each thousand received, on an average, ten or eleven 
sacks a day. Every week saw a reduction in the number, until 
by Midwinter the daily issue to a thousand averaged four sacks. 
Let us say that one of these sacks held two bushels, or the 
four, eight bushels. As there are thirty-two quarts in a bushel, 
one thousand men received two hundred and fifty-six quarts, or 
less than a half pint each. 

We thought we had sounded the depths of misery at Ander- 
sonville, but Florence showed us a much lower depth. Bad as 
was parching under the burning sun whose fiery rays bred 
miasma and putrefaction, it was still not so bad as having one's 
life chilled out by exposure in nakedness upon the frozen ground 
to biting winds and freezing sleet. Wretched as the rusty 
bacon and coarse, maggot-filled bread of Andersonville was, it 
would still go much farther towards supporting life than the 
handful of saltless meal at Florence. 

While I believe it possible for any young man, with the forces 
of life strong within him, and healthy in every way, to survive, 
by taking due precautions, such treatment as we received in 
Andersonville, I cannot understand how anybody could live 
through a month of Florence. That many did live is only an 
astonishing illustration of the tenacity of life in some indi- 
viduals. 



A 8TOBT OF KEBEL MILITAKT PKLSON8. 659 

Let the reaaer imagine — anywhere he likes — a fiiteen-acre 
field, with a stream running through the center. Let him 
imagine this inclosed by a Stockade eighteen feet high, made by 
standing logs on end. Let him conceive of ten thousand feeble 
men, debilitated by months of imprisonment, turned inside this 
inclosure, without a yard of covering given them, and told to 
make their homes there. One quarter of them — two thousand 
five hundred — pick up brush, pieces of rail, splits from logs, 
etc., sufficient to make huts that will turn the rain tolerably. 
The huts are in no case as good shelter as an ordinarily careful 
farmer provides for his swine. Half of the prisoners — five 
thousand — who cannot do so well, w^ork the mud up into rude 
bricks, with which they build shelters that wash down at every 
hard rain. The remaining two thousand five hundred do not 
do even this, but lie around on the ground, on old blankets and 
overcoats, and in day-time prop these up on sticks, as shelter 
from the rain and wind. Let them be given not to exceed a 
pint of corn meal a day, and a piece of wood about the size of 
an ordinary stick for a cooking stove to cook it with. Then let 
such weather prevail as we ordinarily have in the North in 
November — freezing cold rains, with frequent days and nights 
when the ice forms as thick as a pane of glass. Ilow long does 
he think men could live through that ? He will probably say 
that a week, or at most a fortnight, would see the last and 
strongest of these ten thousand lying dead in the frozen mire 
where he wallowed. He will be astonished to learn that 
probably not more than four or five thousand of those who 
underwent this in Florence died iJiere. How many died after 
release — in Washington, on the vessels coming to Annapolis, 
in hospital and camp at Annapolis, or after they reached home, 
none but the Eecording Angel can tell. All that I Icnow is we 
left a trail of dead behind us, wherever we moved, so long as I 
was with the doleful caravan. 

Looking back, after these lapse of years, the most salient 
characteristic seems to be the ease with whdch men died. There 
was little of the violence of dissolution so common at Ander- 
sonville. The' machinery of life in all of us was running 
slowly and feebly; it would simply grow still slower- and 
feebler in some, and then stop without a jar, without a sensa- 



OOU ANDEKSONVILLE. 

tion to manifest it. Nightly one of two or three comrades 
Bleeping together would die. The survivors would not know it 
until they tried to get him to " spoon " over, when they would 
find him rigid and motionless. As they could not spare even 
so httle heat as was still contained in his body, they vvould not 
remove this, but lie up the closer to it until morning. Such a 
thing as a boy making an outcry when he discovered his com- 
rade dead, or manifesting any desire to get away from the 
corpse, w^as unknown. 

I remember one who, as Charles II. said of himself, was 
" an unconscionable long time in dying." His name was Bick- 
f ord ; he belonged to the Twenty-First Ohio Volunteer Infantry, 
lived, I think, near Findlay, O., and was in my hundred, Ilifl 
partner and he were both in a very bad condition, and I was 
not surprised, on making my rounds, one morning, to find them 
apparently quite dead. I called help, and took his partner 
away to the gate. When w^e picked up Bicldord we found he 
still lived, and had strength enough to gasp out : 

" You fellers had better let me alone." We laid him back to 
die, as we supposed, in an hour or so. 

When the Rebel Surgeon came in on his rounds, I showed 
him Bickford, lying there with his eyes closed, and Umbs 
motionless. The Surgeon said : 

" O, that man's dead ; why don't you have him taken out ? " 

I replied : " No, he isn't. Just see." Stooping, I shook the 
boy sharply, and said : 

" Bickford ! Bickford ! ! How do you feel ? " 

The eyes did not unclose, but the lips opened slowly and said 
with a painful effort : 

" F-i-r-s-t R-a-t-e ! " 

This scene was repeated every morning for over a week. 
Every day the Rebel Surgeon w^ould insist that the man should 
be taken out, and every morning Bickford would gasp out with 
troublesome exertion that he felt 

" F-i-r-s-t R-a-t-e ! ' 

It ended one morning by his inability to make his usual 
answer, and then he \vas carried out to join the two score 
ethers beins: loaded into the wairon. 



CHAPTEE LXXIV. 

»IW year's DAT DEATH OF JOHN H. WINDEE HE DIES ON HIB 

WAT TO A DINNER SOMETHING AS TO CHARACTEK AND CAREER 

ONE OF THE WORST MEN THAT EVER LIVED. 

On New Year's Day we were startled by the mformation 
that our old-time enemy — General John 11. Winder — was 
dead. It seemed that the Eebel Sutler of the Post had prepared 
in his tent a grand New Year's dinner to which all the officers 
were invited, Jnst as Winder bent his head to enter the tent 
he fell, and expired shortly after. The boys said it was a clear 
case of Death by Visitation of the Devil, and it was always 
insisted that his last words were : 

" My faith is in Christ ; I expect to be saved. Be sure and 
cut down the prisoners' rations.'* 

Thus passed away the chief evil genius of the Prisoners-of- 
War. American history has no other character approaching 
his in vileness. I doubt if the history of the world can show 
another man, so insignificant in abilities and position, at whose 
door can be laid such a terrible load of human misery. There 
have been many great conquerors and warriors who have 

Waded through slaughter to a throne, 
And shut the gates of mercy on mankind, 

but they were great men, with great objects, with grand plans 
to carry out, whose benefits they thought would be more than 
un equivalent for the suffering they caused. The miseiy they 
inflicted was not the motive of their schemes, but an unpleasant 
incident, and usually the sufferers were men of other races and 

j rehgions, for whom sympathy had been dulled by long 

I intagonism. 

136 



562 AJSDEIiSONVILLJE. 

But Winder was an obscure, dull old man — the commonplace 
descendant of a pseudo-aristocrat whose coAs^ardly incompetence 
had once cost us the loss of our National Capital. More pru- 
dent than his runaway father, he held himself aloof from the 
field ; his father had lost reputation and almost his commission, 
by coming into contact with the enemy ; he would take no such 
foolish risks, and he did not. When false expectations of the 
ultimate triumph of Secession led him to cast his lot with the 
Southern Confederacy, he did not solicit a command in the fi.eld» 
but took up his quarters in Richmond, to become a sort of 
Informer-General, High-Inquisitor and Chief Eavesdropper for 
his intimate friend, Jeffei'son Davis. He pried and spied around 
into every man's bedroom and family circle, to discover traces 
of Union sentiment. The wildest tales mahce and vindic- 
tiveness could concoct found welcome reception in his ears. 
He was only too willing to believe, that he might find excuse 
for harrying and persecuting. He arrested, insulted, impris- 
oned, banished, and shot people, until the patience even of the 
citizens of liichmond gave way, and pressm-e was brought upon 
Jefferson Davis to secure the suppression of his satellite. For 
a long while Davis resisted, but at last yielded, and transferred 
Winder to the office of Commissary General of Prisoners. 
The delight of the Richmond people was great. One of the 
papers expressed it in an article, the key note of which was 

'' Thank God that Richmond is at last rid of old Winder. 
God have mercy upon those to whom he has been sent." 

Remorseless and cruel as his conduct of the office of Provost 
Marshal General was, it gave little hint of the extent to 
which he would go in that of Commissary General of 
Prisoners. Before, he was restrained somewhat by pubUc 
opinion and the laws of the land. These no longer deterred 
him. From the time he assumed command of all the Prisons 
east of the Mississippi — some time in the Pall of 1863 — until 
death removed him, January 1, 1865 — certainly not less than 
twenty-five thousand incarcerated men died in the most 
horrible manner that the mind can conceive. He cannot be 
accused of exaggeration, when, surveying the thousands of new 
graves at Andersonville, he could say with a quiet chuckle that 
"he was " doing more to kill off the Yankees than twenty regi- 



A 8TOKY OF REBEL MILITiLRT PSIBOKt. 563 

merits at the front." No twenty regiments in the Rebel Army 
ever succeeded in slaying anything like thirteen thousand 
Yankees in six months, or any other time. His cold bloo<ied 
cruelty was such as to disgust even the Rebel ofiicers. Colonel 
D. T. Chandler, of the Rebel War Department, sent on a touj 
of inspection to Andersonville, reported back, under dale of 
August 5, 1SG4: : 

" My duty requires me respectfully to recommend a change 
in the officer in command of the post. Brigadier General John 
H. Winder, and the substitution in his place of some one who 
unites both energy and good judgment with some feelings of 
humanity and consideration for the welfare and comfort, as far 
as is consistent with their safe keeping, of the vast number of 
unfortunates placed under his control; some one who, at least, 
will not advocate deliberately^ and in cold blood, the propriety 
of leaving them in their present condition until their number 
IS sufficiently reduced by death to make the present arrange- 
ments suffice for their accommodation, and who "will not con- 
sider it a matter of self-laudation and boasting that he has never 
been inside of the Stockade — a place the horrors of which it is 
difficult to describe, and which is a disgrace to civilization — 
the condition of which he might, by the exercise of a little 
energy and judgment, even with the limited means at his com- 
mand, have considerably improved." 

In his examination touching this report, Colonel Chandler 
says: 

" I noticed that General Winder seemed very indifferent to 
the welfare of the prisoners, indisposed to do anything, or to do 
as much as I thought he ought to do, to alleviate their suf- 
ferings. I remonstrated with him as well as I could, and he 
used that language which I reported to the Depai-tment with 
reference to it — the language stated in the report. When I 
spoke of the great mortality existing among the prisoners, and 
pointed out to him that the sickly season was coming on, and 
that it must necessarily increase unless something was done for 
their relief — the swamp, for instance, drained, proper food fur- 
nished, and in better quantity, and other sanitary suggestions 
which I made to him — he replied to me that he thought it waa 
better to see half of them die than to take care of the men." 



564 AliTDEESONVlLLK. 

It was he who could issue such an order as this, when it was 
supposed that General Stoneman was approaching Ander- 
sonville : 

HEADQUARTEnS MILITARY PRISON, ) 

Ajtoeesontille, Ga., July 27, 1864. i 
The officers on duty and in charge of the Battery of Florida Artilleiy a^ 
the time will, upon receiving notice that the enemy has approached within 
seven miles of this post, open upon the Stockade with grapcshot, without 
reference to the situation beyond these lines of defense. 

John H. Winder, 
Brigadier Qeneral Commanding. 

This man was not only unpunished, but the Government is 
to-day supporting his children in luxury by the rent it pays tear 
the use of his property — the well-known "Winder building, 
which is occupied by one of the Departments at Washington. 

I confess that all my attemps to satisfactorily analyze "Winder's 
character and discover a sufficient motive for his monstrous 
conduct have been futile. Even if we imagine him inspired by 
a hatred of the people of the North that rose to fiendishness, 
we can not understand him. It seems impossible for the mind 
of any man to cherish so deep and insatiable an enmity against 
his fellow-creatures that it could^^not be quenched and turned to 
pity by the sight of even one day's misery at Andersonville or 
Florence. No one man could possess such a grievous sense of 
private or national wrongs as to be proof against tiie daily spec- 
tacle of thousands of his own fellow citizens, inliabitants of the 
same country, associates in the same institutions, educated in the 
same principles, speaking the same language — thousands of his 
brethren in i-ace, creed, and all that unite men into great com- 
munities, starving, rotting and freezing to death. 

Thei'e is many a man who has a hatred so intense that noth- 
ing but the death of the detested one will satisfy it. A still 
fewer number thirst for a more comprehensive retribution: 
they would slay perhaps a half-dozen persons ; and there may 
be such gluttons of revenge as would not be satisfied with the 
sacrifice of less than a score or two, but such would be mon- 
sters of whom there have been very few, even in fiction. How 
must they all bow their diminished heads before a man who fed 
his animosity fat with tens of thousands of lives. 

But, what also militates greatly against the presumption that 



A BTOKY OF REBEL MILITAKY PKIS0N8. 565 

either revenge or an abnormal predisposition to cruelty conld 
have animated Winder, is that the possession of any two such 
mental traits so strongly marked would presuppose a corre- 
sponding activity of other intellectual faculties, which was not 
true of him, as from ail I can learn of him his mind was in no 
respect extraordinary. 

It does not seem possible that he had either the brain to 
conceive, or the firmness of purpose to carry out so gi frantic 
and long-enduring a career of cruelty, because that would imply 
superhuman qualities in a man who had previously held his own 
very poorly in the competition with other men. 

The probability is that neither Winder nor his direct super- 
iors — Howell Cobb and Jefferson Davis — conceived in aU its 
proportions the gigantic engine of torture and death they were 
organizing ; nor did they comprehend the enormity of the crime 
they were committing. But they were willing to do much 
wrong to gain their end ; and the smaller crimes of to-day pre- 
pared them for greater ones to-morrow, and still greater ones 
tiie day following. Killing ten men a day on Belle Isle in Jan- 
uary, by starvation and hardship, led very easily to killing one 
hundred men a day in Andersonville, in July, August and 
September. Probably at the beginning of the war they would 
have felt uneasy at slaying one man per day by such means, 
but as retribution came not, and as their appetite for slaughter 
grew with feeding, and as their sympathy with human misery 
atrophied from long suppression, they ventured upon ever 
widening ranges of destructiveness. Had the war lasted an- 
other year, and they lived, five hundred deaths a day would 
doubtless have been insufficient to disturb them. 

"Winder doubtless went about his part of the task of slaugh- 
ter coolly, leism-ely, almost perfunctorily. His training in the 
Kegular Army was against the Kkelihood of his displaying zeal 
in anything. He instituted certain measures, and let things 
take their course. That course was a rapid transition from bad 
to worse, but it was still in the direction of his wishes, and 
what little of his own energy was infused into it was in the 
direction of impetus, — not of controlling or improving the 
course. To have done things better would have involved some 
personal discomfort. He was not likely to incur personal dis- 



666 ANDEBSONYILLB. 

comfort to mitigate evils that were only afflicting some one 
else. By an effort of one hour a day for two weeks he could 
have had every man in Andersonville and Florence given good 
shelter through his own exertions. He was not only too indif- 
ferent and too lazy to do this, but he was too malignant ; and 
this neglect to allow — simply allow, remember — the prisoners 
to protect their hves by providing their own shelter, gives the 
key to his whole disposition, and would stamp his memory with 
infamy, even if there were no other charges against him. 



CHAPTER LXXV. 

ONB INSTANCE OF A STJOCESSFUL ESCAPE THE ADVENTURES OF 

8EKGEANT WALTER HAKTSOUGH, OF COMPANY K, SIXTEENTH 

ILLINOIS CAVALKY HE GETS AWAY FROM THE REBELS AT 

THOMASVILLE, AND AFTER A TOILSOME AND DANGEROUS JOURNEY 
OF SEVERAL HUNDRED MILES, REACHES OUR LINES IN FLORIDA. 

While I was at Savannah I got hold of a primary geography 
in possession of one of the prisoners, and securing a fragment 
of a lead pencil from one comrade, and a sheet of note paper 
from another, I made a copy of the South Carolina and Georgia 
sea coast, for the use of AndreAvs and myself in attempting to 
escape. The reader remembers the ill success of all our efforts 
in that direction. When we were at Blackshear we still had 
the map, and intended to make another effort " as soon as the 
sign got right." One day while we were waiting for this, 
Walter Hartsough, a Sergeant of Company K, of our battalion, 
came to me and said : 

" Mc, I wish you'd lend me your map a little while. I want 
to make a copy." 

I handed it over to him, and never saw him more, as almost 
immediately after we were taken out " on parole " and sent to 
Florence. I heard from other comrades of the battalion that 
he had succeeded in getting past the guard line and into the 
woods, which was the last they ever heard of him. Whether 
starved to death in some swamp, whether torn to pieces by dogs, 
or killed by the rifles of his pursuers, they knew not. The 
reader can judge of my astonishment as well as pleasure, at 
receiving among the dozens of letters which came to me 
every day while this Hcconnt was appearing in the Blade, one 



signed " Walter Hartsough, late of Co. K, Sixteenth Illinois 
Cavalry." It was like one returned from the grave, and the 
next mail took a letter to him, inquiring eagerly of his adven- 
tm'es after we separated. I take pleasure in presenting the 
reader with his reply, which was only intended as a private 
communication to myself. The first part of the letter I omit, 
as it contains only gossip about our old comrades, which, how- 
ever interesting to myself, would hardly be so to the general 

reader. 

Gexoa, Wayne County, Ia., ) 
May 27, 1879. f 
Dear Comrade Mc. : 

I have been living in this town for ten years, running a gen- 
eral store, under the firm name of Hartsough & Martin, and 
have been more successful than I anticipated. 

**** **** 

I made my escape from Thomasville, Ga., Dec. 7, 1864, by 
running the guards, in company wi'th Frank Ilommat, of Com- 
pany M, and a man by the name of Clipson, of the Twenty- 
First Illinois Infantry. I had. heard the officers in charge of us 
say that they intended to march us across to the other road, 
and take us back to Anderson ville. AVe concluded we would 
take a heavy risk on our lives rather than return there. By 
stinting ourselves we had got a little meal ahead, which we 
thought we would bake up for the journey, but our appetites 
got the better of us, and we ate it all up before starting, "We 
were camped in the woods then, with no Stockade — only aline 
of guards around us. We thought that by a little strategy and 
bold;?ess we could pass these. A7e determined to try. Clipson 
was ^o go to the right, Ilommat in the center, and myself to 
the left. We all shpped through, wittiout a shot. Our ren- 
dezvous was to be the center of a small swamp, through which 
flowed a small stream that supplied the prisoners with water. 
Hommat and I got together soon after passing the guard lines, 
and we began signaling for Clipson. We laid down by a large 
log that lay across the stream, and submerged our limbs and 
part of our bodies in the Avater, the better to screen ourselves 
from observation. Pretty soon a Johnny came along with a 
bunch of turnip tops, that he was taldng up to the camp to 



A 8T0ET OF KKBKL lOLITABY PKIBONS. 669 

trade to the prisoners. As he passed over the log I could havo 
caught him by the leg, which I intended to do if he saw us, but 
he passed along, heedless of those concealed under his very feet» 
which saved liiui a ducking at least, for we were resolved to 
drown him if he discovered us. Waiting here a httle longer 
we left our lurking place and made a circuit of the edge of the 
swamp, still signaling for Clipson. Eut we could find nothing 
of him, and at last had to give him up. 

We were now between ThomasviUe and the camp, and as 
Thomasville was the end of the railroad, the woods were full 
of Rebels ^vaiting transportation, and we approached the road 
carefully, supposing that it was guarded to keep their own men 
from going to town. "We crawled up to the road, but seeing 
no one, started across it. At that moment a guard about 
thirty yards to our left, who evidently supposed that we were 
Rebels, sang out : 

" Whar ye gwine to thar, boys ? " 
' I answered : 

" Jest a-gwine out here a little ways." 

Frank whispered me to run, but I said, "No; wait till he 
halts us, and tlien run." ^ He walked up to where we had 
crossed his beat — looked after us a few minutes, and then, to 
our great relief, walked back to his post. After much trouble 
we succeeded in getting through aU the troops, and started 
fairly on our way. We tried to shape our course toward 
Florida. The country was very swampy, the night rainy and 
dark, no stars were out to guide us, and we made such poor 
progress that when daylight came we were only eight miles 
from our starting place, and close to a road leading from 
Thomasville to Monticello. Finding a large turnip patch, we 
filled our pockets, and then hunted a place to lie concealed in 
during the day. We selected a thicket in the center of a 
large pasture. We crawled into this and laid down. Some 
negros passed close to us, going to their work in an adjoining 
field. They had a bucket of victuals with them for dinner, 
which they hung on the fence in such a way that we could 
have easily stolen it without detection. The temptation to 
hungry men was very great, but we concluded that it was best 
and safest to let it alone. 



570 ANDEBSONVILLK. 

As the negros returned from work in the evening they sepa- 
rated, one old man passing on the opposite side of the thicket 
from the rest. "We halted him and told him that we were 
Rebs, who had taken a French leave of Thomasville ; that 
we were tired of guarding Yanks, and were going home ; and 
further, that we were hungry, and wanted something to eat. 
He told us that he was the boss on the plantation. His master 
lived in Thomasville. He, himself, did not have much to eat, 
but he would show us where to sta}'', and when the folks went 
to bed he would bring us some food. Passing up close to the 
negro quarters we got over the fence and lay down behind it, 
to wait for our supper. 

"We had been there but a short time when a young negro 
came out, and passing close by us, went into a fence corner a few 
panels distant and, kneeling down, began praying aloud, and 
very earnestly, and stranger still, the burden of his supplication 
was for the success of our armies. I thought it the best prayer 
I ever listened to. Finishing his devotions he returned to the 
house, and shortly after the old man came with a good supper 
of corn bread, molasses and milk. He said that he had no meat, 
and that he had done the best he could for us. After we had 
eaten, he said that as the j^oung people had gone to bed, we had 
better come into his cabin and rest awhile, which we did. 

Hommat had a full suit of Eebel clothes, and I had stolen 
sacks enough at Andersonville, when they were issuing rations, 
to make me a shirt and pantaloons, which a sailor fabricated 
for me. I wore these over what was left of my blue clothes. 
The old negro lady treated us very coolly. In a few minutes 
a young negro came in, whom the old gentleman introduced as 
his son, and whom I immediately recognized as our friend of 
the prayerful proclivities. He said that he had been a body 
servant to his young master, who was an officer in the Rebel 
army. 

" Golly ! " says he, " if you 'uns had stood a little longer at 
Stone River, our men would have run." 

I turned to him sharply with the question of what he meant 
by calling us " You 'uns," and asked him if he believed we 
were Yankees. He surveyed us carefully for a few seconds, 
and then said : 



A STORY OF KEBEL MILITAilT FBIS0N8. 571 

"Yes; 1 bleav 3'ou is Yankees." 

He paused a second, and added : 

" Yes, I know you is." 

I asked him how he knew it, and he said that we neither 
looked nor talked lilve their men. 1 then acknowledged that 
we were Yankee prisoners, trying to make our escape to our 
lines. This announcement put new life into the old lady, and, 
after satisfying herself that we were really Y'ankees, she got 
up from her seat, shook hands with us, and declared we 
must have a better supper than we had had. She set immedi- 
ately about preparing it for ns. Taking up a plank in the 
floor, she pulled out a nice flitch of bacon, from which she cut 
as much as we could eat, and gave us some to carry with us. 
She got up a real substantial supper, to which ^ve did full jus- 
tice, in spite of the meal we had already eaten. 

They gave ns a quantity of victuals to take with us, and 
instructed us as well as possible as to our road. They 
warned us to keep awa}'" from the young negros, but trust the 
old ones implicitly. Thanking them over and over for their 
exceeding kindness, we bade them good-by, and started again 
on our journey. Our supplies lasted two days, during which 
time we made good progress, keeping away from the roads, and 
flanking the towns, which were few and insignificant. We 
occasionally came across negros, of whom we cautiously inquired 
as to the route and to wns, and by tlie assistance of our map and 
the stars, got along very well indeed, until we came to the 
Suwanee Kiver. "We had intended to cross this at Columbus or 
Alligator. When within six miles of the river we stopped at 
some negro huts to get some food. The lady who owned the 
negros was a widow, who was born and raised in Massachusetts. 
Her husband had died before the war began. An old negro 
woman told her mistress that we were at the quarters, and she 
sent for us to come to the house. She was a very nice-looking 
lady, about thirty-five years of age, and treated us with great 
kindness. Hommat being barefooted, she pulled off her own 
shoes and stockings and gave them to him, saying that she 
would go to Town the next day and get herself another pair. 
She told us not to try to cross the river near Columbus, as 
their troops had been deserting in great numbers, and the 



572 AJJIDEESONTILLIC. 

river was closely picketed to catch the runaways. She ga^ - 
us directions how to go so as to cross the river about fifty 
miles below Columbus. We struck the river again the next 
night, and I wanted to swim it, but Ilommat was afraid of 
alligators, and I could not induce him to venture into the water. 

We traveled down the river until we came to Moseley's 
Ferry, where we stole an old boat about a third full of water, 
and paddled across. There was quite a little town at that 
place, but we walked right down the main street without: 
meeting any one. Six miles from the river we saw an old 
negro woman roasting sweet potatos in the back yard of a 
house. We were very hungry, and thought we would risk 
something to get food. Hommat went around near her, and 
asked h-er for something to eat. She told him to go and ask 
the white folks. This was the answer she made to every 
question. He wound up by asking her how far it was to Mose- 
ley's Ferry, saying that he wanted to go there, and get some- 
thing to eat. She at last ran into the house, and we ran away 
as fast as we could. We had gone but a short distance when 
we heard a horn, and soon the cursed hounds began bellowing. 
We did our best running, but the hounds circled around the 
house a few times and then took our trail. For a httle while 
it seemed all up with us, as the sound of the baying came 
closer and closer. But our inquiry about the distance to Mose- 
ley's Ferry seems to have saved us. They soon called the 
hounds in, and started them on the track we had come, instead 
of that upon which we were going. The baying shortly died 
away in the distance. We did not waste any time congratu- 
lating ourselves over our marvelous escape, but paced on as fast 
as we could for about eight miles farther. On the way we 
passed over the battle ground of Oolustee, or Ocean Pond. 

Coming near to Lake City we fell in with some negros who 
had been brought from Maryland. We stopped over one day 
with thctn, to rest, and two of them concluded to go with us. 
We were furnished with a lot of cooked provisions, and starting 
one night, made forty-two miles before morning. We kept the 
negros in advance. I told Ilommat that it was a poor command 
that could not afford an advance guard. After traveling two 
nights with the negros, we came near Baldwin. Here I was 



A BTOKY OF EKBEL MILITAKT PKISONS. 67S 

very much afraid of recapture, and I did not want the negros 
with us, if we- were, lest we should be sliot for slave-stealing. 
About daylight of the second morning we gave them the slip. 
We had to skirt Baldwin closely, to head the St. Mary's 
River, or cross it where that was easiest. After crossing the 
river we came to a very large swamp, in the edge of which we 
lay all day. Before nightfall we started to go through it, as 
there was no fear of detection in these swamps. We got 
through before it was very dark, and as we emerged from it 
we discovered a dense cloud of smoke to our right and quite 
close. AVe decided this was a camp, and while we were talking 
the band began to play. This made us think that probabl}'- our 
forces had come out from Fernandina, and taken the place. I 
proposed to Hommat that we go forward and reconnoiter. lie 
refused, and leaving him alone, 1 started forward. I had gone 
but a short distance when a soldier came out from the camp 
■ with a bucket. lie began singing, and the song he sang con- 
vinced me that he was a Rebel. Rejoining Hommat, we held a 
consultation and decided to stay where we were until it became 
darker, before trying to get out. It was the night of the 22d 
of December, and very cold for that country. The camp 
guard had small fires built, which we could see quite plainly. 
After starting we saw that the pickets also had fires, and that 
we were between the two lines. This discovery saved us from 
capture, and keeping about an equal distance between the two, 
we undertook to work our way out. 

We first crossed a line of breastworks, then in succession the 
Fernandina Railroad, the Jacksonville Railroad, and pike, mov- 
ing aU the time nearly parallel with the picket line. Ilere we 
had to halt. Hommat was sufiering greatly with his feet. The 
shoes that had been given him by the widow lady were worn 
out, and his feet were much torn and cut by the terriblv rouo-h 
road we had traveled through swamps, etc. We sat down on 
a log, and I, pulling olF the remains of my army shirt, tore it 
into pieces, and Ilomniat wrapped his feet up in them. A part 
I reserved and tore into strips, to tie up the rents in our panta- 
loons. Going through the swamps and briers had torn them 
into tatters, from waistband \o hem, leaving our skins bare to be 
served in the same way. 



AT<iJi!-KBUP< V UL.L.B-. 



We started again, moving slowly and bearing towards the 
picket fires, which we could see for a distance on our left. 
After traveling some little time the lights on our left ended, 
which puzzled us for a while, until we came to a fearfid big 
swamp, that explained it all, as this, considered impassable, pro- 
tected the right of the camp. We had an awful time in getting 
through. In many places we had to he down and crawl long 
distances through the paths made in the brakes by hogs and 
other animals. As we at length came out, Ilommat turned to 
me and whispered that in the morning we would have some 
Lincoln coffee. He seemed to think this mast certainly end our 
troubles. 

We were now between the Jacksonville Railroad and the St. 
John's Eiver. We kept about four miles from the railroad, for 
fear of running into the Rebel outposts. We had traveled but 
a few miles when Ilommat said he could go no farther, as his 
feet and legs were so swelled and numb that he could not teU 
when he set them upon the ground. I had some matches that 
a negro had given me, and gathering together a few pine knots 
we made a fire — the first that we had lighted on the trip — 
and laid down with it between us. We had slept but a few 
minutes when I awoke and found Hommat's clothes on fire. 
Rousing him we put out the flames before he was badly burned, 
but the thing had excited him so as to give him new life, and 
be proposed to start on again. 

By sunrise we were within eight miles of our lines, and con- 
cluding that it would be safe to travel in the daytime, we went 
ahead, walking along the railroad. The excitement being over, 
Ilommat began to move very slowly again. His feet and legs 
were so swollen that he could scarcely ^walk, and it took us a 
long while to pass over those eight miles. 

At last we came in sight of our pickets. They were negi'os. 
They halted us, and Hommat went forward to speak to them. 
They called for the Officer of the Guard, who came, passed us 
inside, and shook hands cordially with us. His first inquiry 
was if we knew Charley Marseilles, whom you remember ran 
ftiat little bakery at Anderson ville. 

We were treated very kindly at Jacksonville. General 
Scammon was in command of the post, and had only been 



A STORY OF REBEL MILITARY PRiaONS. 575 

released but a short time from prison, so he knew how it was 
himself. I never expect to enjoy as happy a moment on earth 
as I did when I again got under the protection of the old Hag. 
Hommat went to the hospital a few days, and was then sent 
around to Xew York by sea. 

Oh, it was a fearful trip through those Florida swamps. W-' 
would very often have to try a swamp in three or four different 
places before we could get through. Some nights we could not 
travel on account of its being cloudy and raining. There is not 
money enough in the United States to induce me to undertake 
the trip again under the same circumstances. Om' friend CUp- 
son, that made his escape when Ave did, got very neai'ly through 
to our lines, but was taken sick, and had to give liimself up. 
He was taken back to Andersonville and kept until the next 
Spring, when he came through all right. There were sixty- 
one of Company K captured at Jonesville, and I think there 
was only seventeen lived through those horrible prisons. 

You have given the best description of prison life that I have 
ever seen written. The only trouble is that it cannot be por- 
trayed so that persons can realize the suffering and abuse that 
our soldiers endured in those prison hells. Your statements 
are all coi-rect in regard to the treatment that we received, and 
all those scenes you have depicted are as vivid in my mind 
to-day as if they had only occurred yesterday. Please let me 
hear from you again. "Wishing you success in all your under- 
takings, I remain your friend, 

Walter Hartsough, 

Late of K Company, Sixteenth lUinoia Volunteer iTifantrj/. 



CHAPTER LXXVI. 

THE PECULIAR TYPE OF INSANnT PEEVALENT AT FLOEENOB BAB- 

EETt's WA1IT0NNES8 OF CEUELTY WE LEAEN OF BHEEMAu'g 

ADVANCE INTO SOUTH CAROLINA THE EEBEL8 BEGIn' MOVING THK 

PEIS0NEE8 AWAY ANDEEW8 AND I CHANGE OUE TACTICS, AND 

BTAY BEHIND ARRIVAL OF FIVE PRISONERS FROM BHERMAn's 

COMMAND THEIR UNBOUNDED CONFIDENCE IN BHERMAn'b SUC- 
CESS, AND ITS BENEFICIAL EFFECT UPON US. 

One terrible phase of existence at Florence was the vast 
increase of insanity. "We had many insane men at Anderson- 
ville, but the type of the derangement was diHerent, partaking 
more of what the doctors term melancholia. Prisoners coming 
in from the front were struck aghast by the horrors they saw 
everywhere. Men dying of painful and repulsive diseases 
lined every step of whatever path they trod ; the rations given 
them were repu^^nant to taste and stomach ; shelter from the 
fiery sun thei'e was none, and scarcely room enouf^h for them 
to lie down upon. Under these discouraging circumstances, 
home-loving, kindly-hearted men, especially those who had 
passed out of the first flush of youth, and had left wife and 
children behind when they entered the service, were speedily 
overcome with despair of surviving until released ; their hope- 
lessness fed on the same germs which gave it birth, until it 
became senseless, vacant-eyed, unreasoning, incurable melan- 
choly, when the victim would lie for hours, without speaking a 
word, except to babble of home, or would wander aimlessly 
about the camp — frequently stark naked — until he died or 
was shot for coming too near the Dead Line. Soldiers must 
not suppose that this was the same class of weaklings who 



▲ STOfiY OF KKiiKL iliLliAiii I'KlsOKS. 577 

nsnally pine themselves into the Hospital within three months 
after their regiment enters the field. They were as a rule, 
made up of seasoned soldiery, who had become inured to the 
dangers and hardships of active service, and were not likely to 
sink down under any ordinary trials. 

The insane of Florence were of a different class ; they were the 
boys who had laughed at such a yielding to adversity in Andei-son- 
ville, and felt a lofty pity for the misfortunes of those who suc- 
cumbed so. But now the long strain of hardship, privation and 
exposure had done for them what discouragement had done for 
those of less fortitude in Andersonville. The faculties shrank 
under disuse and misfortune, until they forgot their regiments, 
companies, places and date of capture, and finally, even their 
names. I should think that by the middle of January, at least 
one in every ten had sunk to this imbecile condition. It was 
not insanity so much as mental atrophy — not so much aberra- 
tion of the mind, as a paralysis of mental action. The sufferers 
became apathetic idiots, with no ddsire or wish to do or be any- 
thing. If they walked around at all they had to be watched 
closely, to prevent their straying over the Dead Line, and giving 
the young brats of guards the coveted opportunity of killing 
them. Very many of suqh were Idlled, and one of my Mid- 
winter memories of Florence was that of seeing one of these 
unfortunate imbeciles wandering witlessly up to the Dead Line 
from the Swamp, while the guard — a boy of seventeen — stood 
with gun in hand, in the attitude of a man expectmg a covey 
to be flushed, waiting for the poor devil to come so near the 
Dead Line as to afford an excuse for killing him. Two sane 
prisoners, comprehending the situation, rushed up to the lunatic, 
at the risk of their own lives, caught him by the arms, and drew 
him back to safety. 

The brutal Barrett seemed to delight in maltreating these 
demented unfortunates. He either could not be made to under- 
stand their condition, or willfully disregarded it, for it was one 
of the commonest sights to see him knock down, beat, kick or 
otherwise abuse them for not instantly obeying orders which 
their dazed senses could not comprehend, or their feeble limbs 
execute, even if comprehended. 

In my life I have seen many wantonly cruel men. I have 
37 



578 ANDERSONVILLE, 

known numbers of mates of Mississippi river steamers — a 
class which seems carefully selected from ruffians most profi- 
pient in profanity, obscenity and swift-handed violence ; I have 
^een negro-drivers in the slave marts of St. Louis, Memphis and 
Kew Orleans, and overseers on the plantations of Mississippi 
and Louisiana ; as a police reporter in one of the largest cities 
in America, I have come in contact with thousands of the 
brutalized scoundrels — the thugs of the brothel, bar-room and 
alley — who form the dangerous classes of a metropolis. I 
knew Captain Wh'z. But in all this exceptionally extensive 
and varied experience, I never met a man who seemed to love 
cruelty for its own sake as well as Lieutenant Barrett. He 
took such pleasure in inflicting pain as those Indians who sKce 
ojQf their, prisoners' eyelids, ears, noses and hands, before burning 
them at the stake. 

That a thing hurt some one else was alwaj^s ample reason for 
his doiag it. The starving, freezing prisoners used to collect in 
considerable numbers before the gate, and stand there for hours 
gazing vacantly at it. There was no special object in doing 
this, only that it was a central point, the rations came in there, 
and occasionally an officer would enter, and it was the only 
place where anything was likely to occur to vary the dreary 
monotony of the day, and the boys went there because there was 
nothing else to offer any occupation to their minds. It became 
a favorite practical joke of Barrett's to slip up to the gate with 
an armful of clubs, and suddenly opening the wicket, fling them 
one after another, into the crowd, with all the force he possessed. 
Many were knocked down, and many received hurts which 
resulted in fatal gangrene. If he had left the clubs lying where 
thrown, there would have been some compensation for his mean- 
ness, but he always came in and carefully gathered up such as 
he could get, as ammunition for another time. 

I have heard men speak of receiving justice — even favors — 
from Wirz. I never heard any one saying that much of Bar- 
rett. Like Winder, if he had a redeeming quality it was care- 
fully obscured from the view of all that I ever met who knew 
him. 

Where the fellow came from, Avhat State was entitled to the 
discredit of producing and raising him, what he was before the 



A STORY OF KEBEL MILITART PRISONS. 579 

War, what became of hitn after lie left us, are matters of wliich 
I never heard even a rumor, except a very vague one that he 
had been killed by our cavalry, some returned prisoner having 
recognized and shot him. 

Colonel Iverson, of the Fifth Georgia, vas the Post Com- 
mander, lie was a man of some education, but had a violent, 
ungovernable temper, during fits of which, he did very brutai 
things. At other times he would show a disposition towards 
fairness and justice. The worst point in my indictment against 
him is that he suffered Barrett to do as he did. 

Let the reader understand that I have no personal reasons 
for my opinion of these men. They never did anything to me, 
save what they did to all of my companions. I held myself aloof 
from them, and shunned intercourse so effectually that during 
my whole imprisonment I did not speak as many words to 
Rebel officers as are m this and the above paragraphs, and most 
of those ^vere spoken to the Surgeon who visited my hundred. 
I do not usually seek conversation with people I do not Hke, 
and certainly did not with persons for wiiom I had so little 
love as I had for Turner, Ross, "Winder, Wirz, Davis, Iverson 
Barrett, et al. Possibly they felt badly over my distance and 
reserve, but I must confess that they never showed it very 
palpably. 

As January dragged slowly away into February rumors of 
the astonishing success of Sherman began to be so definite and 
well authenticated as to induce belief. We knew that the 
Western Chieftain had marched almost unresisted through 
Georgia, and captured Savannah with com.paratively little diffi- 
culty. We did not understand it, nor did the Rebels around 
us, for neither of us comprehended the Confederacy's near 
approach to dissolution, and we could not explain why a des- 
perate attempt was not made somewhere to arrest the onward 
sweep of the conquering armies of the West. It seemed that 
if there was any vitahty left in Rebeldora it would deal a blow 
that would at least cause the presumptuous invader to pause. 
As we knew nothing of the battles of Franklin and NashviUe, 
we were ignorant of the destruction of Hood's army, and were 
at a loss to account for its failure to contest Sherman's progress. 
The last we had heard of Hood, he had been flanked out of 



680 AlxDEKSoXVILLK. 

Atlanta, but we did not understand that the strength or moroiU 
of his force had been seriously reduced in consequence. 

Soon it drifted in to us that Sherman had cut loose from 
Savannah, as from Atlanta, and entered South . Carolina, to 
repeat there the march through her sister State. Our sources 
of information now were confined to the gossip which our men 
— working outside on parole, — could overhear from the Rebels, 
and communicate to us as occasion served. These occasions 
were not frequent, as the men outside were not allowed to come 
in except rarely, or stay long then. Still we managed to know 
reasonably soon that Sherman was sweeping resistlessly across 
the State, with Hardee, Dick Taylor, Beauregard, and others, 
vainly trying to make head against him. It seemed impossible 
to us that they should not stop him soon, for if each of all these 
leaders had any command worthy the name the aggregate must 
make an army that, standing on the defensive, would give 
Sherman a great deal of trouble. That he would be able to 
penetrate into the State as far as we were never entered into 
our minds. 

By and by we were astonished at the number of the trains 
that we could hear passing north on the Charleston & Cheraw 
Railroad, Day and night for two weeks there did not seem to 
be more than half an hour's interval at any time between the 
rumble and whistles of the trains as they passed Florence 
Junction, and sped away towards Cheraw, thirty-five miles 
north of us. We at length discovered that Sherman had 
reached Branchville, and was swinging around toward Colum- 
bia, and other important points to the north ; that Charleston 
was being evacuated, and its garrison, munitions and stores 
were being removed to Cheraw, which the Rebel Generals 
intended to make their new base. As this nev/s was so well 
confirmed as to leave no doubt of it, it began to wake up and 
encourage all the more hopeful of us. We thought ive could 
see some premonitious of the glorious end, and that we were 
getting vicarious satisfaction at the hands of our friends under 
the command of Uncle Billy. 

One morning orders came for one thousand men to get ready 
to move. Andrews and I held a council of war on the situar 
tion, the question before the house being whether we would go 



▲ 8T0EY OP REBEL Mn.ITAEr PEISON8. 581 

with that crowd, or stay behind. The conchision we came to 
was thus stated by Andrews : 

"Now, Mc, we've flanked ahead every time, and see how 
we've come out. We flanked into the first squad that left 
Richmond, and we were consequently in the first that got into 
Anderson ville. May be if we'd staid back we'd got into that 
squad that was exchanged. We were in tiie first squad that 
left Anderson ville. We were the first to leave Savannah and 
enter Millen. May be if we'd staid back, we'd got exchanged 
with the ten thousand sick. We were tne first to leave Miflen, 
and the first to reach Blackshear. We were again the first to 
leave Blackshear. Perhaps those fellows we left behind there 
are exchanged. Now, as we've played ahead every time, with 
such infernal luck, let's play backward this time, and try what 
that brings us." 

" But, Lale," (Andrews's nickname — his proper name being 
Bezaleel), said I, " we made something by going ahead every 
time — that is, if we were not going to be exchanged. By 
getting into those places first we picked out the best spots to i 
stay, and got tent-building stuff that those who came after us 
could not. And certainly we can never again get into as bad a 
place as this is. The chances are that if tliis does not mean 
exchange, it means transfer to a better prison." 

But we concluded, as I said above, to reverse our usual order 
of procedure and flank back, in hopes that something would 
favor our escape to Sherman. Accordingly, we let the first squad 
go off without us, and the next, and the next, and so on, till 
there were only eleven hundred — mostly those sick .in the 
Hospital — remaining behind. TJiose who went away — we 
afterwards learned, were run down on the cars to Wilmington, 
and afterwards up to Goldsboro, N. C. 

For a week or more we eleven hundred tenanted the Stockade, 
and by burning up the tents of those vrho had gone had the 
only decent, comfortable fires we had while in Florence. In 
hunting around through the tents for fuel we found many 
bodies of those who had died as their comrades were leaving. 
As the larger portion of us could barely walk, the Kebels par- 
oled us to remain inside of the Stockade or within a few hun- 
dred yards of the front of it, and took the guards off. While 



582 A2n5ER80]SVILLfi. 

these were marcliing down, a dozen or more of us, exulting in 
even so much freedom as we had obtained, climbed on the Hos- 
pital shed to see what the outlook was, and perched ourselves 
on the ridgepole. Lieutenant Barrett came along, at a distance 
of two hundred yards, with a squad of guards. Observing us, 
he halted his men, faced them toward us, and they leveled 
their guns as if to fire. He expected to see us tumble down in 
ludicrous alarm, to avoid the bullets. But we hated him and 
them so bad, that we could not give them the poor satisfaction 
of scaring us. Only one of our party attempted to slide down, 
but the moment we swore at him he came back and took his 
seat with folded arms alongside of us. Barrett gave the order 
to lire, and the bullets shrieked over our heads, fortunately not 
hitting anybody. We responded with yells of derision, and 
the worst abuse we could think of. 

Coming down after awhile, I walked to the now open gate, 
and looked through it over the barren fields to the dense woods 
a mile away, and a wild desire to run off took possession of me. 
It seemed as if 1 could not resist it. The woods appeared full 
of enticing shapes, beckoning me to come to them, and the 
winds whispered in my ears 

" Kun ! Run ! Eun ! " 
But the words of my parole were stiU fresh in my mind, and I 
stilled my frenzy to escape by turning back into the Stockade 
and looking away from the tempting view. 

Once five new prisoners, the first w^ had seen in a long time, 
were brought in from Sherman's army. They were plump, 
well-conditioned, well-dressed, healthy, devil-may-care young 
fellows, whose confidence in themselves and in Sherman waa 
simply limitless, and their contempt for all Bebels. and espec- 
ially those who terrorized over us, enormous. 

" Come up here to headquarters," said one of the Eebel ofS- 
cers to them as they stood talking to us ; " and we'll parole 
you." 

" O go to h with your parole," said the spokesman of 

the crowd, with nonchalant contempt; "we don't wa^.t none of 
your paroles. Old Billy'll parole us before Saturday." 

To us they said : 

" Now, you boys want to cheer right up ; keep a stiff upper 



A BTOBY OF BEBSL lOLrTAST PBISONg. 58t 

lip. This thing's workin' all right. Their old Con- 
federacy's goin' to pieces like a house afire. Sherman's promen- 
adin' through it just as it suits him, and he's hable to pay us 
a visit at any hour. We're expectin' him all the time, becaase 
it was generally understood all through the Army that we 
were to take the prison pen here in on our way." 

I mentioned my distrust of the concentration of Kebels at 
Cheraw, and their faces took on a look of supreme disdain. 

" l!^ow, don't let that worry you a minute," said the confident 
spokesman. " All the Eebels between here and Lee's Army 
can't prevent Sherman from going just where he pleases. 
Why, we've quit fightin' 'em except with the Bummers in 
advance. We haven't had to go into regular line of battle 
against them for I don't know how long. Sherman wouldn't 
like anything better than to have 'em make a stand somewhere 
so that he could get a good fair whack at 'em." 

No one can imagine the effect of all this upon us. It was 
better than a car-load of medicines and a train load of provisions 
would have been. From the depths of despondency we sprang 
at once to tip-toe on the mountain-tops of expectation. We did 
little day and night but listen for the sound of Sherman's guns, 
and discuss what we would do when he came. We planned 
schemes of terrible vengeance on Barrett and Iverson, but those 
worthies had mysteriously disappeared — whither no one knew. 
There was hardly an hour' of any night passed v/ithout some 
one of us fancying that he heard the welcome sound of distant 
firing. As everybody knows, by listening intently at night, one 
can hear just exactly what he is intent upon hearing, and so it 
was with us. In the middle of the night boys listening awhile 
with strained ears, would say : 

" Now, if ever I heard musketry firing in my life, that's a 
heavy skirmish line at work, and sharply too, and not more 
than three miles away, neither." 

Then another would say : 

" I don't want to ever get out of here if that don't sound just 
as the skirmishing at ChancellorsviUe did the first day to us. 
We were lying down about four miles off, when it began pat- 
tering just as that is doing now." 

And so on. 



584 AJSnOERSONVILLK. 

One night about nine or ten, there came two short, sharp 
peals of thunder, that sounded precisely like the reports of rifled 
field pieces. We sprang up in a frenzy of excitement, and 
shouted as if our throats would split. But the next peal went 
off in the usual rumble, and our excitement had to subside. 



i 



CHAPTER LXXYIL 

rEUTTLEss wArrma fob shkrman — wb leave Florence — intel- 
ligence OF THE FALL OF WILMINGTON COMMUNICATED TO US BT 

A SLAVE — THE TURPENTINE REGION OF NORTH OAHOLINA WB 

COMB UPON A REBEL LINE OF BATTLE YANKEES AT BOTH 

ENDS OF THE ROAD. 

Things had gone on in the way described in the previous 
chapter until past the middle of February. For more than a 
week every waking hour was spent in anxious expectancy of 
Sherman — listening for the far-off rattle of his guns — straining 
our ears to catch the sullen boom of his artillery — scanning 
the distant woods to see the Rebels falling back in hopeless con- 
fusion before the pursuit of his dashing advance. Though we 
became as impatient as those ancient sentinels who for ten long 
years stood upon the Grecian hills to catch the first glimpse of 
the flames of burning Troy, Sherman came not. We after- 
wards learned that two expeditions were sent down towards us 
from Cheraw, but they met with unexpected resistance, and 
were turned back. 

It was now plain to us that the Confederacy was tottering to 
its fall, and we were only troubled by occasional misgivings that 
we might in some way be caught and crushed under the top- 
pling ruins. It did not seem possible that with the cruel tenac- 
ity with which the Rebels had clung to us they would be will- 
ing to let us go free at last, but would be tempted in the rage 
of their final defeat to commit some unparalleled atrocity 
upon us. 

One day all of us who were able to walk were made to fall 
in and march over to the railroad, where we were loaded into 



586 A2JDEBSONVILLK. 

box cars. The sick — except those who were manifestly dying 
— were loaded into wagons and hauled over. The dying were 
left to their fate, without any companions or nurses. 

The train started off in a northeasterly directioD, and as wo 
went through Florence the skies were crimson with great fires, 
burning in aU directions. We were told these were cotton and 
mihtary stores being destroyed in anticipation of a visit from a 
part of Sherman's forces. 

When morning came we were still running in the same direc- 
tion that we started. In the confusion of loading us upon the 
cars the previous evening, I had been allowed to approach too 
near a Kebel officer's stock of rations, and the result was his 
being the loser and myself the gainer of a canteen filled with 
fairly good molasses. Andrews and I had some corn bread, 
and we breakfasted sumptuously upon it and the molasses, 
which was certainly none-the-less sweet from having been 
stolen. 

Our meal over, we began reconnoitering, as much for employ- 
ment as anything else. We were in the front end of a box car. 
With a saw made on the back of a case-knife we cut a hole 
through the boards big enough to permit us to pass out, and 
perhaps escape. We found that we were on the foremost box 
car of the train — the next vehicle to us being a passenger 
coach, in which were the Rebel officers. On the rear platform 
of this car was seated one of their servants — a trusty old 
slave, well dressed, for a negro, and as respectful as his class 
usually was. Said I to him ; 

" AVell, uncle, where are they taking us 1 " 

He replied : 

" Well, sah, I couldn't rightly say." 

*' But you could guess, if you tried, couldn't you ? " 

"Yes sah." 

He gave a quick look around to see if the door behind him 
was so securely shut that he could not be overheard by the 
Rebels inside the car, his dull, stolid face lighted up as a negro's 
always does in the excitement of doing something cunning, and 
he said in a loud whisper : 

" Dey's a-gwine to take you to Wilmington — ef dey kin gii 
you dar ! " 



A 8T0BT OF KEJJKL MlLllAKY I'KISONS. 587 

" Can get us there ! " said I in astonishment. " Is there any- 
thing to prevent them taking us there ? " 

The dark face filled with inexpressible meaning. I asked : 

" It isn't possible that there are any Yankees down there to 
interfere, is it ? " 

The great eyes flamed up with intelligence to tell me that I 
guessed aright; again he glanced nervously around to assure 
himself that no one was eavesdropping, and then he said in a 
whisper, just loud enough to be heard above the noise of the 
moving train : 

" De YanTcees took Wilmington yesterday mawningP 

The news startled me, but it was true, our troops having 
driven out the Eebel troops, and entered Wilmington, on the 
preceding day — the 22d of February, 1865, as I learned after- 
wards. How this negro came to know more of what was going 
on than his masters puzzled me much. That he did know more 
was beyond question, since if the Rebels in whose charge we 
were had known of Wilmington's fall, they would not have gone 
to the trouble of loading us upon the cars and hauling us one 
hundred miles in the direction of a City which had come into 
the hands of our men. 

It has been asserted by many writers that the negros had 
some occult means of diffusing important news among the 
mass of their people, probably by relays of swift runners who 
traveled at night, going twenty-five or thirty miles and back 
before morning. Yery astonishing stories are told of things 
communicated in this way across the length or breadth of the 
Confederacy. It is said that our officers in the blockading 
fleet in the Gulf heard from the negros in advance of the pub- 
hcation in the Eebel papers of the issuance of the Proclamation 
of Emancipation, and of several of our most important vic- 
tories. The incident given above prepares me to believe all 
that has been told of the perfection to which the negros had 
brought their "grapevine telegraph," as it was jocularly 
termed. 

The Eebels beheved something of it, too. In spite of their 
rigorous patrol, an institution dating long before the war, and 
the severe punishments visited upon negros found off their 



688 AiSi)KK80NVlLLK. 

master's premises without a pass, none of them entertained a 
doubt that the young negro men were in the habit of making 
long, mysterious journeys at night, which had other motives 
than love-making or chicken stealing. Occasionally a young 
man would get caught fifty or seventy-five miles from his 
"quarters," while on some errand of his own, the natm'e of 
which no punishment could make him divulge. His master 
would be satisfied that he did not intend running away, because 
he was likely going in the wrong direction, but beyond this 
nothing could be ascertained. It was a common belief among 
overseers, when they saw an active, healthy young " buck " 
sleepy and languid about his work, that he had spent the night 
on one of these excursions. 

The country we were running through — if such straining, 
toilsome progress as our engine was making could be called 
running — was a rich turpentine district. "We passed by for- 
ests where all the trees were marked with long scores through 
the bark, and extended up to a hight of twenty feet or more. 
Into these, the turpentine and rosin, running down, were caught, 
and conveyed by negros to stills near by, where it was prepared 
for market. The stills were as rude as the mills we had seen in 
Eastern Tennessee and Kentucky, and were as liable to fiery ^ 
destruction as a powder-house. Every few miles a wide space 
of ground, burned clean of trees and underbrush, and yeti 
marked by a portion of the stones which had formed the f ur- ; 
nace, showed where a turpentine still, managed by careless and : 
ignorant blacks, had been licked up by the breath of fiame. ^ 
They never seemed to re-build on these spots — whether from 
superstition or other reasons, I know not. 

Occasionally we came to great piles of barrels of turpentine, 
rosin and tar, some of which had laid there since the blockade ! 
had cut off communication with the outer world. Many of I 
the barrels of rosin had burst, and their contents melted in the 
heat of the sun, had run over the ground fike streams of lava, 
covering it to a depth of many inches. At the enormous price 
rosin, tar and turpentine were commanding in the markets of 
the w^orld, each of these piles represented a superb fortune. 
Any one of them, if lying upon the docks of New York, would 



A 6T0KY OF KKBEL ^IILITAKT PKISONS. 588 

biave yielded enough to make every one of us upon the train 
3omfortable for life. But a few months later the blockade was 
raised, and they sank to one-thirtieth of their present value. 

These terebinthine stores were the property of the plantation 
lords of the lowlands of North Carolina, who correspond to 
the pinchbeck barons of the rice districts of South Carolina. 
A.S there, the whites and negros we sav/ were of the lowest. 
Host squalid type of humanity. The people of the middle and 
ipland districts of North Carolina are a much superior race 
:o the same class in South Carolina. They are mostly of 
Scotch-Irish descent, with a strong infusion of English-Quaker 
i)lood, and resemble much the best of the Yirginians. They 
nake an effort to diffuse education, and have many of tlie virtues 
3f a simple, non-progressive, tolerably industrious middle class, 
[t was here that the strong Union sentiment of North Carolina 
lumbered most of its adherents. The people of the lowlands 
ivere as different as if belonging to another race. The enor- 
nous mass of ignorance — the three hundred and fifty thousand 
lien and women who could not read or write — were mostly 
3lack and white serfs of the great landholders, whose planta- 
tions lie within one hundred miles of the Atlantic coast. 

As we approached the coast the country became swampier, 
md our old acquaintances, the cypress, with their malformed 
' knees," became more and more numerous. 

About the middle of the afternoon our train suddenly stopped. 
Looking out to ascertain the cause, we were electrified to see a 
Rebel line of battle stretched across the track, about a half mile 
ihead of the engine, and with its rear toward us. It was as 
'eal a line as was ever seen on any field. The double ranks of 
' Butternuts," with arms gleaming in the afternoon sun, 
itretched away out througli the open pine woods, farther than 
;ve could see. Close behind the motionless line stood the com- 
Dany officers, leaning on their drawn swords. Behind these 
itiU, were the regimental officers on their horses. On a slight 
'ise of the ground, a group of horsemen, to whom other horse- 
nen momentarily dashed up to or sped away from, showed the 
;tation of the General in command. On another knoll, at a 
ittle distance, were several field pieces, standing " in battery," 
.he cannoneers at the guns, the postillions dismounted and hold- 



590 'andeksohville. 

ing their horses by the bits, the caisson men standin^j^ in readi- 
ness to serve out ammunition. Our men were evidently close 
at hand in strong forc^, and the. engaf^ement was likely to open 
at any instant. 

For a minute we were speechless with astonishment. Then 
came a surge of excitement. What should we do ? What 
could we do? Obviously nothing. Eleven hundred, sick, 
enfeebled prisoners could not even overpower their guards, let 
alone make such a diversion in the rear of a line-of-battle as 
would assist our folks to gain a victory. But while we debated 
the engine whistled sharply — a frightened shriek it sounded 
to us — and began pushing our train rapidly backward over the 
rough and wretched track. Back, back we went, as fast as 
rosin and pine knots could force the engine to move us. The 
cars swayed continually back and forth, momentarily threaten- 
ing to fly the crazy roadway, and roll over the embankment or 
into one of the adjacent swamps. We would have hailed such 
a catastrophe, as it would have probably killed more of the 
guards than of us, and the confusion would have given many 
of the survivors opportunity to escape. But no such accident 
happened, and tow^ards midnight we reached the bridge across 
the Great Pedee River, where our train was stopped by a 
squad of Rebel cavalrymen, who brought the intelligence that 
as Kilpatrick was expected into Florence every hour, it would 
not do to take us there. 

We were ordered off the cars, and laid down on the banks of 
the Great Pedee, our guards and the cavalry forming a line 
around us, and taking precautions to defend the bridge against 
Kilpatrick, should he find out our w^hereabouts and come 
after us. 

" Well, Mc," said Andrews, as we adjusted our old overcoat 
and blanket on the ground for a bed ; " I guess we needn't care 
whether school keeps or not. Our fellows have evidently got 
both ends of the road, and are coming towards us from each 
way. There's no road — not even a wagon road — for the 
Johnnies to run us off on, and I guess all we've got to do is to 
stand still and see the salvation of the Lord. Bad as these 
hounds are, I don't believe the}^ will shoot us down rather than 
let our folks retake us. At least tliey won't since old Winder's 



A 8T0BY OF REBEL MILITAKT TKISONS. 691 

dead. If he was alive, he'd order our throats cut — one by 
one — with the guai'ds' pocket knives, rather than give us up. 
I'm only afraid we'll be allowed to starve before our folks 
reach us." 
I concurred in this view. 



CHAPTEE Lxxym. 

EKITTEN TO FLORENCB AND A SHORT BOJOtTRIir THERE OFF TOWAWJt 

WlLillNGTON AGAIN CRIBBINO A REBEL OFFICER'S LUNCH — 

BIGN3 OP APPROACHINO OUR LINES TERROR OF OUR RASCALLY 

GUARDS ENTRANCE INTO GOd's COUNTRY AT LAST. 

But Kilpatrick, like Sherman, came not. Perhaps he knew 
that all the prisoners had been removed from the Stockade ; 
perhaps he had other business of more importance on hand; 
probably his movement was only a feint. At all events it was 
definitely known the next day that he had withdrawn so far as 
to render it wholly unlikely that he intended attacking Flor- 
rence, so we were brought back and returned to our old quarters. 
For a week or more we loitered about the now nearly-abandoned 
prison ; skulked and crawled around the dismal mud-tents like 
. the ghostly denizens of some Potter's Field, who, for some 
reason had been allowed to return to earth, and for awhile 
creep painfully around the little hillocks beneath which they 
had been entombed. 

A few score, whose vital powers were strained to the last 
degr-ee of tension, gave up the ghost, and sank to dreamless 
rest. It mattered now little to these when Sherman came, or 
when Kilpatrick's guidons should flutter through the forest of 
sighing pines, heralds of life, happiness, and home — 

After life's fitful fever they slept well — 
Treason had done Its worst. Nor steel nor polflon : 
Malice domestic, foreign levy, nothing 
Could touch them further. 

One day another order came for us to be loaded on the cars, 
And over to the railroad we went again in the same fashion aj 



A STORY OF REHKL MILIlAin I'RISONS. .l93 

before. The conipuiatively i\i\y of us alio wt-ie still able to 
walk at all well, loaded ourselves down with the bundles and 
blankets of our less fortunate companions, who hobbled and 
limped — many even crawling on their hands and knees — 
over the hard, frozen ground, by our sides. 

Those not able to crawl even, were taken in wagons, for the 
orders were imperative not to leave a living prisoner behind. 

At the railroad we found two trains awaiting us. On the 
front of each engine were two rude white flags, made by fasten- 
ing the halves of meal sacks to short sticks. The sight of 
these gave us some ho})e, but our belief that Rebels were con- 
stitutional liars and deceivers Avas so firm and fixed, that we 
persuaded ourselves that the Hags meant nothing more than 
some wilful delusion for us. 

Again we started olf in the direction of Wilmington, and 
traversed the same country described in the previous chapter. 
Again Andrews and I found ourselves in the next box car to 
the passenger coach containing the Rebel ollicers. Again we 
cut a hole through the end, with our saw, and again found a 
darky servant sitting on the rear platform. Andrews went 
out and sat down alongside of him, and found that he was 
seated upon a large gunnybag sack containing the cooked 
rations of the Rebel oflicers. 

The intelligence that there was something there worth tak- 
ing Andrews communicated to me by an expressive signal, of 
which soldiers campaigning together as long as he and I had 
always have an extensive and well understood code. 

I took a seat in the hole we had made in the end of the car, 
in reach of Andrews. Andrews called the attention of the 
negro to some feature of the country near by, and asked him a 
question in regard to it. As he looked in the direction indi- 
cated, Andrews slipped his hand into the mouth of the bag, 
and pulled out a small sack of wheat biscuits, which he passed 
to me and I concealed. The darky turned and told Andrews 
all about the matter in regard to which the interrogation had 
been made. Andrews became so much interested in what was 
being told him, that he sat up closer and closer to the darky, 
who in turn moved farther away from the sack. 

Next we ran through a turpentine ] plantation, and as the 
88 



694 



AJn)ER80NVILLl:. 



darky was pointing out where the still, the master's place, the 
" quarters," etc., were, Andrews managed to fish out of the bag 
and pass to me three roasted chickens. Then a great s-^a-mp 




ANDREWS MANAGED TO FISH OUT OF TFIE BAG AND PASS 
TO ME THREE ROASTED CniCKENS. 



called for description, and before Ave were through with it, I 
had about a peck of boiled sweet potatos. 

Andrews emptied the bag as the darky was showing him a 
great peanut plantation, taking from it a small frying-pan, a 
canteen of molasses, and a half-gallon tin bucket, which had 
been used to make coffee in.^ We divided up our wealth of 
eatables with the rest of the boys in the car, not forgetting to 
keep enough to give ourselves a magnificent meal. 

As we ran along we searched carefully for the place where 
we had seen the line-of-battle, expecting that it would now be 
marked with signs of a terrible conflict, but we could see 



± 8TOBT OF KEBEL MILITARY PBI80N8. 595 

nothing. "We could not even fix the locality where the lino 
stood. 

As it became apparent that we were going directly toward 
"Wilmington, as fast as our engines could pull us, the excitement 
rose. "We had many misgivings as to whether our folks still 
retained possession of "Wilmington, and whether, if they did, 
the Eebels could not stop at a point outside of our lines, and 
transfer us to some other road. 

For hours we had seen nobody in the country through which 
we were passing. "What few houses were visible were appar- 
ently deserted, and there were no Towns or stations anywhere. 
"We were very anxious to see some one, in hopes of getting a 
hint of what the state of affairs was in the direction we were 
going. At length we saw a young man — apparently a scout — 
on horseback, but his clothes were equally divided between the 
blue and the butternut, as to give no clue to which side he 
belonged. 

An hour later we saw two infantrymen, who were evidently 
out foraging. They had sacks of something on their backs, and 
wore blue clothes. This was a very hopeful sign of a near 
approach to our lines, but bitter experience in the past warned 
us against being too sanguine. 

About 4 o'clock p. m., the trains stopped and whistled long 
and loud. Looking out I could see — perhaps half-a-mile away 
— a hne of rifle pits running at right angles with the track. 
Guards, whose guns flashed as they turned, were pacing up and 
down, but they were too far away for me to distinguish their 
uniforms. 

The suspense became fearful. 

But I received much encouragement from the singular con- 
duct of our guards. First I noticed a Captain, who had been 
especially mean to us while at Florence. 

He was walking on the ground by the train. His face was 
pale, his teeth set, and his eyes shone with excitement. He 
called out in a strange, forced voice to his men and boys on the 
roof of the cars : 

" Here, you fellers : git down off'en thar an' form a line." 

The fellows did so, in a slow, constrained, frightened way, 
and huddled together, in the most unsoldierly manner. 



596 AJJJDEESONVILLE. 

The whole thing reminded me of a scene I once saw in our 
lines, where a weak-kneed Captain was ordered to take a party 
of rather chicken-hearted recruits out on the skirmish-line. 

We immediately divined what was the matter. The lines in 
front of us were really those of our people, and the idiots of 
guards, not knowing of their entire sfifety when protected by a 
flag of truce, were scared half out of their small wits at 
approaching so near to armed Yankees. 

We showered taunts and jeers upon them. An Irishman in 
my car yelled out : 

" Och, ye dirty spalpeens ; it's not shootin' prisoners ye are 
now ; it's comin' where the Yankee b'ys hev the gun ; and the 
minnit 3^e say thim yer white livers show themselves in yer 
pale faces. Bad luck to the blatherin' bastards that yez are, 
and to the mothers that bore ye." 

At length our train moved up so near to the line that I could 
see it was the grand, old loyal blue that clothed the forma 
of the men who were pacing up and dow n. 

And certainly the world does not hold as superb looking men 
as these appeared to me. Finely formed, stalwart, full-fed and 
well clothed, they formed the most delightful contrast with the 
scrawny, shambling, villain-visaged little clay-eaters and whit« 
trash who had looked down upon us from the sentry boxes for 
many long months. 

I sprang out of the cars and began washing my face and 
hands in the ditch at the side of the road. The Eebel Captain, 
noticing me, said, in the old, hateful, brutal, imperious tone : 

" Git back in dat cah, dah." 

An hour before I would have scrambled back as quickly as 
possible, knowing that an instant's hesitation would be followed 
by a bullet. Now, I looked him in the face, and said as irritat- 
ingly as possible : 

" O, you go to , you Eebel. I'm going into 

Uncle Sam's lines with as little Rebel filth on me as possible." 

He passed me without replying. 

His day of shooting was past. 

Descending from the cars, we passed through the guards into 
our lines, a Rebel and a Union clerk checking us off as we passed. 
By the time it was dark we were all under our flag again. 



A. STORY OF RKB5JL. MILITARY PRISONS. 597 

The place where we came tlirough was several miles west of 
Wilmington, where the railroad crossed a branch of the Cape 
Fear River. The point was held by a brigade of Schoheld's 
army — the Twenty-Third Army Corps. 

The boys lavished unstinted kindness upon us. All of the 
brigade off duty crowded around, offering us blankets, shirts? 
shoes, pantaloons and other articles of clothing and similar 
things that we were obviously in the greatest need of. The 
sick were carried, by hundreds of willing hands, to a sheltered 
spot, and laid upon good, comfortable beds improvised with 
leaves and blankets. A great hue of huge, generous fires was 
built, that every one of us could have plenty of place around 
them. 

By and by a line of wagons came over from Wilmington 
laden with rations, and they were dispensed to us with what 
seemed reckless prodigality. The fid of a box of hard tack 
would be knocked off, and the contents handed to us as we filed 
past, with absolute disregard as to quantity. If a prisoner 
looked wistful after receiving one handful of crackers, another 
was handed to him ; if his long-famished eyes still lingered as 
if enchained by the rare display of food, the men who were 
issuing said : 

"Here, old fellow, there's plenty of it: take just as much as 
you can carry in your arms." 

So it was also with the pickled pork, the coffee, the sugar, 
etc. We had been stinted and starved so long that we could 
not comprehend that there was anywhere actually enough of 
anything. 

The kind-hearted boys who were acting as our hosts began 
preparing food for the sick, but the Surgeons, who had arrived 
in the meanwhile, were compelled to repress them, as it was 
plain that while it was a dangerous experiment to give any 
of us all we could or would eat, it would never do to give the 
sick such a temptation to kill themselves, and only a limited 
amount of food was allowed to be given those who were unable 
to walk. 

Andrews and I hungered for coffee, the delightful fumes of 
which filled the air and intoxicated our senses. We procured 
enough to make our half-gallon bucket full and very strong. 



598 ANDEliSOI*i:iLL,E. 

We drank so much of this that Andrews became positively 
drunk, and fell helplessly into some brush. I pulled him out 
and dragged him away to a place where we had made our rude 
bed. 

I was dazed. I could not comprehend that the long-looked 
for, often-despaired-of event had actually happened. I feared 
that it was one of those tantalizing dreams that had so often 
haunted my sleep, only to be followed by a wretched awaken- 
ing. Then I became seized with a sudden fear lest the Eebels 
attempt to retake me. The line of guards around us seemed 
very slight. It might be forced in the night, and all of us 
recaptured. Shivering at this thought, absurd though it waa, 
I arose from our bed, and taking Andrews with me, crawled 
two or three hundred yards into a dense undergrowth, wher* 
in the event of our lines being forced, we would be overlooked 



CHAPTER LXXIX. 

OETTING USED TO FRE?:r)()M DELIGHTS OF A LAND WHERE THERE IB 

ENOUGH OF EVERYTHING FIRST GLIMPSE OF THE OLD FLAG 

WILMINGTON AND ITS HISTORY LIEUTENANT GUSHING FLBST 

ACQUAINTANCE WITH THE COLORED TROOPS LEAVING FOR HOMK 

DESTRUCTION OF THE " THORN " liY A TORPEDO THE MOOK 

monitor's ACHIEVEMENT. 

After a sound sleep, Andrews and I awoke to the enjoyment 
of our first day of freedom and existence in God's country. 
The sun had already risen, bright and warm, consonant with 
the happiness of the new life now opening up for us. 

But to nearly a score of our party his beams brought no 
awakening gladness. They fell upon stony, staring eyes, from 
out of which the light of life had now faded, as the light of 
hope had done long ago. The dead lay there upon the rude 
beds of fallen leaves, scraped together by thoughtful comrades 
the night before, their clenched teeth showing through parted 
lips, faces fleshless and pinched, long, unkempt and ragged hair 
and whiskers just stirred by the lazy breeze, the rotting feet 
and limbs drawn uj), and skinny hands clenched in the last 
agonies. 

Their fate seemed harder than that of any who had died 
before them. It was doubtful if many of them knew that they 
were at last inside of our own lines. 

Again the kind-hearted boys of the brigade crowded around 
us with proffers of service. Of an Ohio boy who directed his 
kind tenders to Andrews and me, we procured a chunk of coarse 
rosin soap about as big as a pack of cards, and a towel. Never 
was there as great a quantity of solid comfort got out of that 



600 



AiN DKliftUN V ILLK. 



much soap as we obtained. It was the first that we had since 
that which I stole in Wirz's headquarters, in June — nine 
months before. We felt that the dirt which had accumulated 
upon us since then would subject us to assessment as real estate 
if w^e were in the North. 

Hurrying off to a little creek we began our ablutions, and it 




IN OOD 8 COUNTRY AT LAST. 

■was not long until Andrews declared tiiat there was a percepti- 
ble sand-bar forming in the stream, from what we washed off. 
Dirt deposits of the pliocene era rolled off feet and legs. 
Eocene incrustations let loose reluctantly from neck and ears ; 
the hair was a mass of tangled locks matted with nine months' 
accumulation of pitch pine tar, rosin soot, and South Carolina 
Band, that we did not think w^e had better start in upon it until 
we either had the shock cut off, or had a whole ocean and a va't 
of soap to wash it out with. 

After scrubbing until we were exhausted we got off the first 



A 8T0KY OF KEBKL MIHT AKY PRISONS. 601 

few outer layers — the post tertiary formation, a geologist would 
term it — and the smell of many breakfasts cooking, coming 
down over the hill, set our stomachs in a mutiny against any 
longer fasting. 

We went back, rosy, panting, glowing, but happy, to get our- 
selves some breakfast. 

Should Providence, for some inscrutable reason, vouchsafe 
me the years of Methusaleh, one of the pleasantest recollec- 
tions that will abide with me to the close of the nine hundredth 
and sixty-ninth year, will be of that delightful odor of cooking 
food which regaled our senses as we came back. From the 
boiling coffee and the meat frying in the pan rose an incense 
sweeter to the senses a thousand times than all the perfumes of 
far Arabia. It differed from the loathsome odor of cooking 
corn meal as much as it did from the effluvia of a sewer. 

Our noses were the first of our senses to bear testimony that 
we had passed from the land of starvation to that of plenty. 
Andrews and I hastened off to get our own breakfast, and soon 
had a half-gallon of strong coffee, and a frying-pan full of 
meat cooking over the fire — not one of the beggarly skimped 
little fires we had crouched over during our months of impris- 
onment, but a royal, generous fire, fed with logs instead of 
shavings and splinters, and giving out heat enough to warm a 
regiment. 

Having eaten positively all that we could swallow, those of 
us .who could walk were ordered to fall in and march over to 
Wilmington. We crossed the branch of the river on a pontoon 
bridge, and took the road that led across the narrow sandy 
island between the two branches, WiJmington being situated 
on the opposite bank of the farther one. 

When about half way a shout from some one in advance 
caused us to look up, and then we saw, flying from a tall stee- 
ple in Wilmington, the glorious old Stars and Stripes, resplend- 
ent in the morning sun, and more beautiful than the most gor 
geous web from Tyrian looms. We stopped with one accord, 
and shouted and cheered and cried — until every throat was 
sore and every eye red and blood-shot. It seemed as if our 
cup of happiness would certainly run over if any more additions 
were made to it. 



602 ANDERSON V I LLE. 

"When we arrived at the bank of the river opposite Wilming- 
ton, a whole world of new and interesting sights opened up 
before us. Wilmington, during the last year-and-a-half of the 
war, was, next to Richmond, the most important place in the 
Southern Confederacy. It was the only port to which blockade 
runnino: was at all safe enoufj^h to be lucrative. The Rebels held 
the strong forts of Caswell and Fisher, at the mouth of Cape 
Fear River, and outside, the Frying Pan Shoals, which extended 
along the coast forty or fifty miles, kept our blockading fleet so 
far off, and made the line so weak and scattered, that there was 
comparatively little risk to the small, swift-sailing vessels em" 
ployed by the blockade runners in running through it. The 
only way that blockade running could be stopped was by the 
reduction of Forts Caswell and Fisher, and it was not stopped 
until this was done. 

Before the war Wilmington was a dull, sleepy North Caro- 
lina Town, with as little animation of any kind as a Breton 
Village. The only business was the handling of the tar, tur- 
pentine, rosin, and peanuts produced in the surrounding 
country, a business never lively enough to excite more than a 
lazy ripple in the sluggish lagoons of trade. But very new 
wine was put into this old bottle when blockade running began 
to develop in importance. Then this Sleepy Hollow of a place 
took on the appearance of San Francisco in the [hight of the 
gold fever. The English houses engaged in blockade running 
established branches there conducted by young men who lived 
like princes. All the best houses in the City were leased by 
them and fitted up in the most gorgeous style. They literally 
clothed themselves in purple and fine linen and fared sumptu- 
ously every day, with their fine wines and imported delicacies 
and retinue of servants to wait upon them. Fast young Rebel 
officers, eager for a season of dissipation, could imagine nothing 
better than a leave of absence to go to Wilmington, Money 
flowed like water. The common sailors — the scum of all 
foreign ports — who manned the blockade runners, received as 
high as one hundred dollars in gold per month, and a bounty 
of fifty dollars for every successful trip, which from Kassau 
could be easily made in seven da3^s. Other people were paid 
in proportion, and as the old proverb says, " What comes over 



A BTOEY OF KEBEL MILITAKY PRISONS. 



601 



the DevU's back is spent under his breast," the money so 
obtained w^ squandered recklessly, and aU sorts of debauchery 



ran riot. 



On the around where we were standing had been erected 
several large steam cotton presses, built to compress cotton for 
the blockade runners. Around them were stored immense 
quantities of cotton, and near by were nearly as great stores of 
Lpentine, rosin and tar. A little farther down the river wa. 
navy yard with docks, etc., for the accommodation building and 
repair of blockade runners. At the time our folks took Fort 
Fisher and advanced on Wihnington the docks were filled yth 
vessels The retreating Rebels set fire to everythmg - cotton, 
cotton' presses, turpentine, rosin, tar, navy yard, naval stores 
timber, docks, and vessels, and the fire made clean work. Our 
people arrived too late to save anything, and when we came in 
the smoke from the burned cotton, turpentme, etc., still filled 
the woods. It was a signal illustration of the ravages of war. 
Here had been destroyed, in a few hours, more property than 
a half-million industrious men would accumulate m their lives. 
mZT^ gratifying as the sight of the old ^ag fiymg m 
triumph, wa^ the exhibition of our naval power m the river 
before uL The larger part of the great North Atlantic squadron, 
which had done such exceUent service in the reduction of the 
defenses of Wilmington, was lying at anchor, with thei^ h^d- 
reds of huge guns yawning a^ if ardent for more great foits to 
beat down: Ire vessels to sink, more heavy artillery to crush, 
more P-bds to conquer. It seemed as if there were cannon 
enough there to blow the whole Confederacy into kingdom 
come AH was life and animation around the fieet. On the 
decks the officers were pacing up and down. One on each 
vessel carried a long telescope, with which he almost constantly 
swept the horizon. Numberless small boats, each rowed by 
nIatVuniformed men, and carrying a flag m the Btern darted 
hither and thither, carrying officers on er^^^^/JJ^^^^^^^ 
pleasure. It was such a scene as enabled me to realize m a 
measure, the descriptions I had read of the pomp and circum- 

stance of naval warfare. i^tprp^tin^ 

AVhile we were standing, contemplating all the mteiestmg 

sights within view, a small steamer, about the size of a canal 



606 AiJDEI^so^ viLLa. 

boat, and carrying several bright brass guns, ran swiftly ajid - 
noiselessly up to the dock near by, and a young, pale-faced ■ 
officer, slender in build and nervous in manner, stepped ashoro. '] 
Some of the blue jackets who were talking to us looked at him 
and the vessel with the greatest expression of interest, and said : 
" Hello 1 there's the ' Monticello ' and Lieutenant Gushing." } 
This, then, was the naval boy hero, with whose exploits the 
whole country was ringing. Our saUor friends proceeded to tell 
us of his achievements, ot which they were justly proud. They 
told us of his perilous scouts and his hairbreadth escapes, of hia 
wonderful audacity and still more wonderful success — of his 
capture of Towns with a handful of sailors, and the destruction 
of valuable stores, etc. I felt very sorry that the man was not 
a cavalry commander. There he would have had full scope for 
his peculiar genius. lie had come prominently into notice in 
the preceding Autumn, when he had, by one of the most daring 
performances narrated in naval history, destroyed the formid- 
able ram "Albermarle." This vessel had been constructed by 
the Keoels on the Koanoke River, and had done them very good 
service, first by assisting to reduce the forts and capture the 
garrison at Plymouth, N. C, and afterward in some minor 
engagements. In October, 1864, she was lying at Plymouth. 
Around her was a boom of logs to prevent sudden approaches 
of boats or vessels from our fleet. Gushing, who was then 
barely twenty-one, resolved to attempt her destruction. He 
fitted up a steam launch with a long spar to which he attached 
a torpedo. On the night of October 27th, with thirteen com- 
panions, he ran quietly up the Sound and was not discovered 
until his boat struck the boom, when a terrific fire was opened 
upon him. Backing a short distance, he ran at the boom with 
such velocity that his boat leaped across it into the water be- 
yond. In an instant more his torpedo struck the side of the 
"Albemarle" and exploded, tearing a great hole in her hull, 
which sank her in a few minutes. At the moment the torpedo 
went off the "Albermarle" fii'ed one of her great guns directly 
into the launch, tearing it completely to pieces. Lieutenant 
Gushing and one comi'ade rose to the surface of the seething 
water and, swimming ashore, escaped. What became of the 
rest is not known, but their fate can hardly be a matter of 
doubt. 



A STOKY OF tcBKL MlLUAity I'UJtjUNS. 607 

We were ferried across the river into Wilmington, and 
marched up the streets to some vacant ground near the railroad 
depot, where we found most of our old Florence comrades already 
assembled. When they left us in the middle of February they 
were taken to Wilmington, and thence to Goldsboro', N. C, 
where they were kept until the rapid closing in of our Armies 
made it impracticable to hold them any longer, when they 
were sent back to Wilmington and given up to our forces as 
we had been. 

It was now nearly noon, and we were ordered to fall in and 
draw rations, a bewildering order to us, who had been so long 
in the habit of drawing food but once a day. We fell in in 
single rank, and marched up, one at a time, past where a group 
of employes of the Commissary Department dealt out the 
food. One handed each prisoner as he passed a large slice of 
meat ; another gave him a handful of ground coffee ; a third a 
handful of sugar ; a fourth gave him a pickle, while a fifth and 
sixth handed him an onion and a loaf of fresh bread. Thia 
filled the horn of our plenty full. To have all these in one 
day — meat, coffee, sugar, onions and soft bread — was simply 
to riot in undreamed-of luxury. Many of the boys — poor 
fellows — could not yet realize that there was enough for all, 
or they could not give up their old " flanking " tricks, and they 
stole around, and falling into the rear, came up again for 
another share. We laughed at them, as did the Commissary 
men, who, nevertheless, duplicated the rations already received, 
and sent them away happy and content. 

What a glorious dinner Andrews and I had, Avith our half 
gallon of strong coffee, our soft bread, and a pan full of fried 
pork and onions! Such an enjoyable feast will never be 
eaten again by us. 

llere we saw negro troops under arms for the first time — 
the most of the organization of colored soldiers having been 
done since our capture. It was startling at first to see a 
stalwart, coal-black negro stalking along with a Sergeant's 
chevrons on his arm, or to gaze on a regimental line of dusky 
faces on dress parade, but we soon got used to it. The first 
strong peculiarity of the negro soldier that impressed itself 
upon us was his literal obedience of orders. A white soldier- 



608 AJTDEBSOi^ VILLE. 

usually allows himself considerable discretion in obeying ordersi 
— :be aims more at the spirit, while the negro adheres to the- 
strict letter of the command. 

For instance, the second day after our arrival a line of 
guards were placed around us, with orders not to allow any 
of us to go up town without a pass. The reason of this was 
that man}'- weak — even dying — men would persist in wan- 
dering about, and would be found exhausted, frequently dead, 
in various parts of the City. Andrews and I concluded to 
go up town. Approaching a negro sentinel he warned us 
back with, 

"Stand back, dab; don't come any furder; it's agin de 
awdahs ; you can't pass." 

lie would not allow us to argue the case, but brought his gun 
to such a threatening position that we fell back. Going down 
the. line a little farther, we came to a white sentinel, to whom I 
said : 

" Comrade, what are your orders ? " 

lie replied : 

" My orders are not to let any of you fellows pass, hut nvy 
beat only extends to that out-house there.''^ 

Acting on this plain hint, we walked around the house and 
went up-town. The guard siinply construed his orders in a 
liberal spirit. He reasoned that they hardly applied to us, 
since we were evidently able to take care of ourselves. 

Later we had another illustration of this dog-like fidelity of 
the colored sentinel. A number of us were quartered in a large 
and empty warehouse. On the same floor, and close to us, 
were a couple of very fine horses belonging to some officer. 
We had not been in the warehouse very long until we concluded 
that the straw with which the horses were bedded would be 
better used in making couches for ourselves, and this suggestion 
was instantly acted upon, and so thoroughly that there was not 
a straw left between the animals and the bare boards. Presently 
the owner of the horses came in, and he was greatly incensed 
at what had been done. He relieved his mind of a few sul- 
phurous oaths, and going out, came back soon with a man with 
more stra^v, and a colored soldier whom he stationed by the 
horses, sa3'ing : 



A STORY OF UKBKL MILHARY PRISONS. 609 

" Now, look here. You musn't let anybody take anything 
away from these stalls ; d'you understand me? — not a thing." 

He then went out. Andrews and I had just finished 
cooking dinner, and were sitting down to eat it. "Wishing to 
lend our frying-pan to another mess, I looked around for 
something to lay our meat upon. Near the horses I saw a 
book cover, which would answer the purpose admirably. 
Springing up, I skipped across to where it was, snatched it up, 
and ran back to ray place. As I reached it a yell from the 
boys made me look around. The darky was coming at me 
" full tilt," with his gun at a " charge bayonets 1 " As I 
turned he said : 

" Put dat right back dah 1 " 

I said : 

" Why, this don't amount to anything, this is only an old 
book cover. It hasn't anything in the world to do with the 
horses." 

He only replied : 

« Put dat right back dah I " 

I tried another appeal : 

" Now, you woolly-headed son of thunder, hayen't you got 
sense enough to know that the officer who posted you didn't 
mean such a thing as this ? He only meant that we should not 
be allowed to take any of the horses' bedding or equipments ; 
don't you see ? " 

I might as well have reasoned with a cigar store Indian. He 
set his teeth, his eyes showed a dangerous amount of white, and 
foreshortening his musket for a lunge, he hissed out again : 

" Put dat right back dah, I tell you ! " 

I looked at the bayonet ; it was very long, very bright, and 
very sharp. It gleamed cold and chilly like, as if it had not 
run through a man for a long time, and yearned for another 
opportunity. Nothing but the whites of the darky's eyes 
could now be seen. I did not want to perish there in the fresh 
bloom of my youth and loveliness ; it seemed to me as if it was 
my duty to reserve myself for fields of future usefulness, so I 
walked back and laid the book cover precisely on the spot 
whence I had obtained it, while the thousand boys in the house 
set up a yell of sarcastic laughter. 
39 



eio 



ANDEKSONVILLK. 



We staid in TVilmington a few days, days of almost purely 
animal enjoyment — the joy of having just as much to eat as 
we could possibly swallo^v, and no one to molest or make us 
afraid in any way. How we did eat — and fill up. The 
wrinkles in our skin smoothed out under the stretching, and we 
began to feel as if we were returning to our old plumpness, 
though so far the plumpness was wholly abdominal. 

One morning we were told that the transports would begin 
going back with us that afternoon, the first that left taking 
the sick, Andrews and I, truef to our old prison practices, resolved 
to be among those on the first boat. We slipped through the 
guards and going up town, Avent straight to Major General 
Schofield's headquarters and solicited a pass to go on the first 
boat — the steamer " Thorn." General Schotield treated us very 
kindly, but decHned to let anybody but the helplessly sick go 
on the " Thorn. " Defeated liere we went down to where the 
vessel was lying at the dock, and tried to smuggle ourselves 
aboard, but the guard Avas too strong and too vigilant, and we 
were driven away. Going along the dock, angry and discour- 
aged by our failure, Ave saw a Surgeon, at a little distance, Avho 
was examining and sending the sick who could Avalk aboard 
another vessel — the " General Lyon." We took our cue, and 
a little shamming secured from him tickets Avhich permitted us 
to take our passage in her. The larger portion of those on 
board Avere in the hold, and a f e vv Avere on declv. Andre avs and 
I found a snug place under the forecastle, by the anchor chains. 

Both vessels speedily received their complement, and leaving 
their docks, started doAvn the river. The " Thorn " steamed 
ahead of us, and disappeared. Shortly after Ave got under Avay, 
the Colonel Avho was put in command of the boat — himself a 
released prisoner — came around on a tour of inspection. He 
found about one thousand of us aboard, and singling me out 
made me the non-commissioned officer in command. I was 
put in charge of issuing the rations and of a barrel of milk 
punch which the Sanitary Commission had sent doAvn to be 
dealt out on the voyage to such as needed it. I Avent to work 
and arranged the boys in the best way I could, and returned to 
the deck to view the scenery. 

Wilmington is thirty-four miles from the sea, and the river 



A BTOBT OF BEBEL MILITAKY FKiSUJNti. 611 

for that distance is a calm, broad estuary. At this time the 
resources of Eebel engineering were exhausted in defense 
against its passage by a hostile fleet, and undoubtedly the best 
work of the kind in the Southern Confederacy was done upon 
it. At its mouth were Forts Fisher and Caswell, the strongest 
sea coast forts in the Confederacy. Fort Caswell was an old 
United States fort, much enlarged and strengthened. Fort 
Fisher was a new work, begun immediately after the begin- 
ning of the war, and labored at incessantly until captured. 
Behind these every one of the thirty-four miles to "Wilmington 
was covered with the fire of the best guns the English arsenals 
could produce, mounted on forts built at every advantageous 
spot. Lines of piles running out into the water, forced incom- 
ing vessels to wind back and forth across the stream under the 
point-blank range of massive Armstrong rifles. As if this were 
not sufficient, the channel was tliicldy studded with torpedoes 
that would explode at the touch of the keel of a passing vessel. 
These abundant precautions, and the telegram from General 
Lee, found in Fort Fisher, stating that unless that stronghold 
and Fort Caswell were held he could not hold Richmond, gi-^e 
some idea of the importance of the place to the Rebels. 

"We passed groups of hundreds of sailors fishing for torpedos, 
and saw many of these dangerous monsters, which they had 
hauled up out of the water. We caught up with the " Thorn," 
when about half way to the sea, parsed her, to our great delight, 
and soon left a gap between us of nearly half-a-mile. We ran 
through an opening in the piling, holding up close to the left 
side, and she apparently followed our course exactly. Suddenly 
there was a dull roar ; a column of water, bearing with it frag- 
ments of timbers, planking and human bodies, rose up through 
one side of the vessel, and, as it fell, she lurched forward and 
sank. She had struck a torpedo. I never learned the nmnber 
lost, but it must have been very great. 

Some nttle time after this happened we approached Fort 
Anderson, the most powerful of the works between Wilming- 
ton and the forts at the mouth of the sea. It was built on the 
ruins of the Uttle Town of Brunswick, destroyed by Corn- 
wallis during the Revolutionary War. We saw a monitor 




612 AJfDKKSONVlLL*. 

lying near it, and sought good positions to view this specimen 
of the redoubtable ironclads of which we had heard and rea4 
so much. It looked precisely as it did in pictures, as black, m 
grim, and as uncompromising as the impregnable floating 
fortress which had brought the " Merrimac " to terms. 

But as we approached closely we noticed a limpness about 
the smoke stack that seemed very inconsistent with the cus- 
tomary rigidity of cylmdrical iron. Then the escape pipe 

seemed scarcely able to 

maintain itself upright. A 

^ few minutes later we dia- 

^ covered that our terrible 

r~""^ ' ' " X- Cyclops of the sea was a 

_ r^ flimsy humbug, a theatrical 

•*< r imitation, made by stretch- 

ing blackened canvas over 
TUB MOCK MomroB. ^ wooden frame. 

One of the officers on board told us its story. After the fall 
of Fort Fisher the Rebels retired to Fort Anderson, and 
offered a desperate resistance to our army and fleet. Owing 
to the shallowness of the water the latter could not come into 
close enough range to do effective work. Then the happy idea 
of this sham monitor suggested itself to some one. It was 
prepared, and one morning before daybreak it was sent floating 
in on the tide. The other monitors opened up a heavy fire 
from their position. The Rebels manned their guns and rei)lied 
vigorously, by concentrating a terrible cannonade on the sham 
monitor, which sailed grandly on, undisturbed by the heavy 
rifled bolts tearing through her canvas turret. Almost frantic 
with apprehension of the result if she could not be checked, 
every gun that Avould bear was turned upon her, and torpedos 
were exploded in her pathway by electricity. All these she 
treated with the silent contempt they merited from so invulner- 
able a monster. At length, as she reached a good easy range 
of the fort, her bow struck something, and she swung around as 
if to open fire. That was enough for the Rebels. With Scho- 
field's army reaching out to cut off their retreat, and this dread- 
ful thins about to tear the insides out of their fort with four 



A 8TOEY OF BKBKL MILITAEY PRISONS- 618 

hundred-pound shot at quarter-mile range, there was nothing 
for them to do but consult their own safety, which they did 
with such haste that they did not spike a gun, or destroy a 
pound of stores. 



CHAPTER LXXX. 

VIBIT TO FOET FIBHEK, AND INSPECTION OF THAT 8TE0NGH0LD THU 

WAY IT WAS OAPTUIiED — OUT ON THE OCEAN SAILING TEEBIBLT 

BE A-8ICK — BAPm RECOVERY ARRIVAL AT ANNAPOLIS — WASHED, 

CLOTHED AND FED — UNBOUNDED LUXURY, AND DAYS OF UNADUIy 
TERATED HAPPINESS. 



When we reached the mouth of Cape Fear River the wind 
was blowing so hard that our Captain did not think it best to 
venture out, so he cast anchor. The cabin of the vessel was 
filled with officers who had been released from prison about the 




same time we were. I was also given a berth in the cabin, in 
consideration of my being the non-commissioned officer in charge 
of the men, and I found the associations quite pleasant. A 



A STOKY OF KKUEL illLITAKY i'KlSOHS. 



615 



party was made up, which included me, to visit Fort Fisher, and 
we spent the larger part of a day very agreeably in wandering 
over that great stronghold. We found it wonderful in its 
strength, and were prepared to accept the statement of those 
who had seen foreign defensive works, that it was much more 
powerful than the famous Malakoff, which so long defied the 
besiegers of Sebastopol. 

The situation of the fort was on a narrow and low s}>it of 
ground between Cape Fear Tliver and the ocean. On this the 
Rebels had erected, with prodigious labor, an embankment over 
a mile in length, twenty-live feet thick and twenty feet high. 
About two-thirds of this bank faced the sea ; the other third 
ran across the spit of land to protect the fort against an attack 
from the land side. Still stronger than the bank forming the 

front of the fort 



were the traverses, 
which prevented 
an enfilading fire- 
These were regular 
hills, twenty-five to 
forty feet high, and 
broad and long in 
proportion. There 
were fifteen o r 
twenty of them 
along the face of 
the fort. Inside of 
them were capac- 
ious bomb proofs, 
Buificiently large to 
shelter the whole 
garrison. It seemed 
as if a whole Town- 
ship had been dug 




THE ONE HUKDRED AND FIFTY POUND AEM8TKONO. 

(from a PHOTOeBAFH. ) 



up, carted down there and set on edge. In front of the works 
was a strong palisade. Between each pair of traverses were one 
or two enormous guns, none less than one-hundred-and-fifty- 
pounders. Among these we saw a great Armstrong gun, which 
had been presented to the Southern Confederacy by its manu- 



616 ANDERSON V ILL fi. 

facturer, Sir William Armstrong, who, like the majority of the" 
English nobility, was a warm admirer of the Jeff. Davis crowd. 
It was the finest piece of ordnance ever seen in this country. 
The carriage was rosewood, and the mountings gilt brass. The 
breech of the gun had five reinforcements. 

To attack this place our Government assembled the most 
powerful Heet ever sent on such an expedition. Over seventy- 
five men-of-war, including six monitors, and carrying slx 
hundred guns, assailed it with a storm of shot and shell that 
averaged four projectiles per second for several hours; the 
para{»et was battered, antl the large guns crushed as one 
smashes a bottle with a stone. The garrison fled into the 
bomb-proofs for protection. The troops, who had landed above 
the fort, moved up to assail the land face, while a brigade of 
failors and marines attacked the sea face. 

As the fleet had to cease firing to allow the charge, the 
Rebels ran out of their casemates and. manning the parapet, 
o{)ened such a fire of musketry that the brigade from the fleet 
was driven back, but the soldiers made a lodgment on the land 
face. Then began some beautiful co-operativ^e tactics between 
the Army and Xavy, communication being kept up with signal 
flags. Our men were on one side of the parapets and the 
Rebels on the other, with the fighting almost hand-to-hand. 
The vessels ranged out to where their guns would rake the 
Hebel line, and as their shot tore down its length, the/Rebels 
gave way, and falling back to the next traverse, renewed the 
conflict there. Guided by the signals our vessels changed their 
positions, so as to rake this line also, ami so the fight went on 
until twelve traverses had been carried, one after the other, 
when the Rebels surrendered. 

The next day the Rebels abandoned Fort Caswell and other 
fortifications in the immediate neighborhood, surrendered two 
gunboats, and fefl back to the lines at Fort Anderson. After 
Fort Fisher fell, several blockade-runners were lured inside and 
captured. 

Kever before had there been such a demonstration of the 
power of heavy artillery. Huge cannon were pounded into frag- 
ments, hiUs of sand ripped open, deep crevasses blown in th© 
^ound by exploding shells, wooden buildings reduced to kind- 



A STOKY OF KEBEL MILITAKT I»III80N8. 



oi: 



ling-wood, etc. The ground was literally paved with fragments 
of shot and shell, which, now red with rust from the corroiling 
salt air, made the interior of the fort resemble what one of our 
part}'- likened it to — " an old brickyard." 
Whichever way we looked along the shores we saw abundant 




THE rNTANTRT ASSAULT ON FORT yTPnER. 

evidence of the greatness of the business which gave the place 
its importance. In all directions, as far as the eye could reach, 
the beach w^as dotted with the bleaching skeletons of blockade- 
runners — some run ashore by their mistaking the channel, 
more beached to escape the hot pursuit of our blockaders. 

Directly in front of the sea face of the fort, and not four 
hundred yards from the savage mouths of the huge guns, the 
blackened timbers of a burned blockade-runner sliowcl above 
the water at low tide. Coming in from Xassau with a cararo 
of priceless value to the gasping Confederacy, she was observed 
and chased by one of our vessels, a swifter sailer, even, than 
herself. The war ship closed rapidly upon her. She sought 
the protection of the guns of Fort Fisher, ^vhich opened venom- 
ously on the chaser. They did not stop her, though they were 
less than half a mile away. In another minute she would have 
sent the Kebel vessel to the bottom of the sea, by a broadside 
from her heavy guns, but the Captain of the latter turned her 



■618 AJS"D£KriON VILLE. 

suddenly, and ran her high up on the beach, wrecking his ves- 
sel, but saving the much more valuable cargo. Our vessel then 
hauled off, and as night fell, quiet was restored. At midnight 
two boat-loads of determined men, rowing with muffled oars 
moved silently out from the blockader towards the beached 
vessel In their boats they had some cans of turpentine, 
and several large shells. When they reached the blockade- 
runner they found all her crew gone ashore, save one watchman, 
whom they overpowered before he could give the alarm. 
They cautiously felt their way around, with the aid of a dark 
lantern, secured the ship's chronometer, her papers and some 
other desired objects. They then saturated with the turpentine 
piles of combustible material, placed about the vessel to the 
best advantage, and finished by depositing the shells where their 
explosion would ruin the machinery. All this was done so neaj 
to the fort that the sentinels on the parapets could be heard 
with the greatest distinctness as they repeated their half-hourly 
•cry of " All's well." Their preparations completed, the daring 
fellows touched matches to the doomed vessel in a dozen places 
at once, and sprang into their boats. The flames instantly 
enveloped the ship, and showed the gunners the incendiaries 
rowing rapidly away. A hail of shot beat the water into a 
foam around the boats, but their good fortune stiU attended 
them, and they got back without losing a man. 

The wind at length calmed sufficiently to encourage oup 
Captain to venture out, and we were soon battling with the 
rolling waves, far out of sight of land. For awhile the novelty 
of the scene fascinated me. I was at last on the ocean, of 
which I had heard, read and imagined so much. The crealdng 
cordage, the straining engine, the plunging ship, the wild waste 
of tumbling billows, everj'one apparently racing to where our 
tossing bark was struggling to maintain herself, all had an 
entrancing interest for me, and I tried to recall Byron's sublime 
apostrophe to the ocean — 

Thou glorious mirror, where the Almighty's form 

Glasses itself in tempest : in all time, 

Calm or convulsed — in breeze, or gale, or storm, 

Icing the pole, or in the torrid clime 

Dark-heaving — boundless, endless, and sublime — 

The image of eternity — the throne 

Of the invisible ; even from out thy slime 

The monsters of the deep are made ; each zone 

Obeyt the« : thoa goest forth, dread, fathomiesB, alone. 



A 8T0BY OF REBEL MILITAKY PlilSONS. 619 

Just then, my reverie was broken by the strong hand of the 
gruff Captain of the vessel descending upon my shoulder, and 
he said : 

" See, here, youngster 1 Ain't you the fellow that was put in 
command of these men ? " 

I acknowledged such to be the case. 

" Well," said the Captain ; " I want you to 'tend to your 
business and straighten them around, so that we can clean off 
the decks." 

I turned from the bulwark over which I had been contem- 
plating the vasty deep, and saw the sorriest, most woe-begone 
lot that the imagination can conceive. Every mother's son 
was wretchedly sea-sick. They were paying the penalty of 
their overfeeding in Wilmington ; and every face looked as if 
its owner was discovering for the first time what the real lower 
depths of human misery was. They all seemed afraid they 
would not die ; as if they were praying for death, but feehng 
certain that he was going back on them in a most shameful 
way. 

We straightened them around a little, washed them and the 
decks off with a hose, and then I started down in the hold to 
see how matters were with the six hundred down there. The 
boys there were much sicker than those on deck. As I lifted 
the hatch there rose an odor which appeared strong enough to 
raise the plank itself. Every onion that had been issued to us 
in Wilmington seemed to lie down there in the last stages of 
decomposition. All of the seventy distinct smells which Cole- 
ridge counted at Cologne might have been counted in any given 
cubic foot of atmosphere, while the next foot would have an 
entirely different and equally demonstrative " bouquet." 

I recoiled, and leaned against the bulwark, but soon sum- 
moned up courage enough to go half-way down the ladder, and 
shout out in as stern a tone as I could command : 

" Ilere, now 1 I want you fellows to straighten around there, 
right off, and help clean up ! " 

They were as angry and cross as they were sick. They 
wanted nothing in the world so much as the opportunity I had 
given them to swear at and abuse somebody. Every one of 
them raised on his elbow, and shaking his fist at me yelled out : 



620 



ANDERSON V ILLK. 



" O, YOU go to , you . Just come down 

another step, and I'll knock the whole head off 'en you." 

I did not go down any farther. 

Coming back on the deck my stomach began to feel qualmish. 
Some wretched idiot, whose grandfather's grave I hope the 
jackasses have defiled, as the Turks would say, told me that the 
best preventive of sea-sickness was to drink as much of the milk 
punch as I could swallow. 

Like another idiot, I did so. 

I went again to the side of the vessel, but now the fascina- 
tion of the scene had all faded out. The restless billows were 
dreary, savage, hungry and dizzying ; they seemed to claw at, 
and tear, and wrench the struggling ship as a group of huge 
lions would tease and worry a captive dog. They distressed 
her and all on board by dealing a blow which would send her 
reeling in one direction, but before she had swung the full 
length that impulse would have sent her, catcxiing her on the 
opposite side with a stunning shock that sent her another way, 
only to meet another rude buffet from still another side. 

I thou2:ht we could all have stood it if the motion had been 
like that of a swing — backward and forward — or even if the 
to and fro motion had been complicated with a sidewise 
swing, but to be put through every possible bewildering motion 
in the briefest space of time was more than heads of iron and 
stomachs of brass could stand. 

Mine were not made of such perdurable stuff. 

They commenced mutinous demonstrations in regard to the 
milk punch. 

I bejran wondering whether the milk w^as not the horrible 
beer swill, stumptail kind of which I had heard so much. 

And the whisky in it ; to use a vigorous "Westernism, descrip- 
tive of mean whisky, it seemed to me that 1 could smell the 
boy's feet who plowed the corn from which it was distilled. 

Then the onions I had eaten in Wilmington began to rebel, 
and incite the bread, meat and coffee to gastric insurrection, 
and I became so utterly wretched that life had no farther 
attractions. 

While I was leaning over the bulwark, musing on the com- 



A 8TOKY OF KKBEL MILITAfiT PKISON8. 621 

plete hollowness of all earthly things, the Captain of the vessel 
caught hold of me roughly, and said : 

" Look here, you're just playin' the very devil a-commandin' 

these here men. Why in don't you stiffen up, and hump 

yourself around, and make these men mind, or else belt them 
over the head with a capstan bar ? Now I want you to 'tend 
to your business. D'you understand me ? " 

I turned a pair of weary and hopeless eyes upon him, and 
started to say that a man who would talk to one in my forlorn 
condition of " stiffening up," and " belting other fellows over 
the head with a capstan bar," would insult a woman dying with 
consumption, but I suddenly became too full for utterance. 

The milk punch, the onions, the bread, and meat and coffee, 
tired of fighting it out in the narrow quarters where I had 
stowed them, had started upwards tumultuously. 

I turned my head again to the sea, and looking down into its 
smaragdine depths, let go of the victualistic store which I had 
been industriously accumulating ever since I had come through 
the lines. 

I vomited until I felt as empty and hollow as a stove pipe, 
There was a vacuum that extended clear to my toe-nails. I 
feared that every retching struggle would dent me in, all over, 
as one sees tin preserving cans crushed in by outside pressure, 
and I apprehended that if I kept on much longer my shoe-soles 
would come up after the rest. 

I will mention, parenthetically, that to this day I abhor milk 
punch, and also onions. 

Unutterably miserable as I was I could not refrain from a 
ghost of a smile, when a poor country boy near me sang out in 
an interval between vomiting spells : 

" O, Captain, for God's sake, stop the boat and lem'me go 
ashore, and I swear I'll walk ^very step of the way home." 

He was like old Gonzalo in the Tempest : 

Now would I glv« a thonsand furlongs of sea for an acre of barren groimd; long heath; 
brown furre; anything. The Wills aboTe be donel but I would fain die a dry death. 

After this misery had lasted about two days we got past Cape 
Hatteras, and out of reach of its malign influence, and recovered 
as rapidly as we had been prostrated. 



•23 AJ^DERSONVILLE. 

We regained spirits and appetites with amazing swiftness ; 
the sun came out warm and cheerful, we cleaned up our quar- 
ters and ourselves as best we could, and durinc;^ the remainder 
of the voyage were as blithe and cheerful as so many crickets. 

The fun in the cabin was rollicking. The officers had been 
as sick as the men, but were wonderfully vivacious when the 
mal du mer passed off. In the party was a fine glee club, 
which had been organized at " Camp Sorgum," the officers' 
prison at Columbia. Its leader was a Major of the Fifth Iowa 
Cavalry, who possessed a marvelously sweet tenor voice, and 
well developed musical powers. While we were at Wilmington 
he sang " When Sherman Marched Down to the Sea," to an 
audience of soldiers that packed the Opera House densely. 

The enthusiasm he aroused was simply indescribable ; men 
shouted, and the tears ran down their faces. He was recalled 
time and again, each time with an increase in the furore. The 
audience would have staid there all night to listen to him sing 
that one song. Poor fellow, he only went home to die. An 
attack of pneumonia carried him olf within a fortnight after 
we separated at Annapolis. 

The Glee Club had several songs whidh they rendered in 
regular negro minstrel style, and in a way that was irresistibly 
ludicrous. One of their favorites was " Billy Patterson." AH 
standing up in a ring, the tenors would lead off : 

"I saw an old man go riding by," 

and the baritones, flinging themselves around with the loose- 
ness of Christy's Minstrels, in a " break down," would reply : 

Don't tdl me I Don't tell »?»< 1" 

Then the tenors would r(3sume : 

"Saya I, 'Ole man, your horse'U die.'" 

Then the baritones, with an air of exaggerated interest i 

" A-h-a-a-a, Billy Patterson 1 " 



Tenors ; 



* For, If be dies, I'll tan his Bkln ; 
An' If he lives I'll ride him agin." 



A 8T0KY OF REBEL MILITAKY PKI80N8. 633 

All together, with a furious " break down " at the close ; 

"Then I'll lay five dollnrs (lo\\'n, 

And count them one by one ; 
Then I'll lay five dollars down, 

If anybody will 8how me the man 
That struck Billy Patterson." 

And so on. It used to upset my gravity entirely to see a crowd 
of grave and dignified Captains, Majors and Colonels going 
through this nonsensical drollery with all the abandmi of pro. 
fessional burnt-cork artists. 

As we were nearing the entrance to Chesapeake Bay we 
passed a great monitor, who was exercising her crew at the 
guns. She fired directl}'" across our course, the huge four hun- 
dred pound balls skipping along the water, about a mile ahead 
of us, as we boys used to make the flat stones skip in the play 
of "DuclvS and Drakes." One or two of the shots came so 
close that I feared she might be mistaking us for a Rebel ship 
intent on some raid up the Bay, and I looked up anxiously to 
see that the flag should float out so conspicuously that she could 
not help seeing it. 

The next day our vessel ran alongside of the dock at the 
Naval Academy at Annapolis, that institution now being used 
as a hospital for paroled prisoners. The musicians of the Fost 
band came down with stretchers to carry the sick to the Hos- 
pital, while those of us who were able to walk were ordered to 
fall in and march up. The distance was but a few hundred 
yards. On reaching the building we marched up on a little 
balcony, and as we did so each one of us was seized by a hos. 
pital attendant, who, with the quick dexterity attained by long 
practice, snatched every one of our filthy, lousy rags off in the 
twinlvling of an eye, and flung them over the raihng to the 
ground, where a man loaded them into a' wagon with a pitch- 
fork. 

With them went our faithful little black can, our hoop iron 
spoon, and our chessboard and men. 

Thus entirely denuded, each boy was given a shove which 
sent him into a little room, where a barber pressed him down 
upon a stool, and almost before he understood what was being 
done, had his hair and beard cut off as close as shears would do 



624 



AITDERSONTILLK. 



it. Another tap on the back sent the shorn lamb into a room 
furnished with great tubs of water and with about six inches of 
soap suds on the zinc-covered floor. 

In another minute two men with sponges had removed every 
trace of prison grime from his body, and passed him on to two 
more men, who wiped him dry, and moved him on to where a 

man handed him a 
new shirt, a pair 
of drawers, pair of 
BOcks, pair of pant- 
aloons, pair of slip- 
pers, and a hospi- 
tal gown, and mo- 
tioned him to go 
on into the large 
room, and array 
himself in his new 
: garments. Like 
everything else 
-; about the Hospital 
this performance 
was reduced to a 
perfect system. 
Not a word was 

THEY REMOVFDEVKRY TRACE OF PRISON GRIME. SpokcU by any- 
body, not a mo- 
ment's time h;st, and it seemed to me that it was not ten minutes 
after I marched up on the balcony, covered with dirt, rags, ver- 
min, and a matted shock of hair, until I marched out of the 
room, clean and well clothed. Is ow I began to feel as if I was 
really a man again. 

The next tiling done was to register our names, rank, regi- 
ment, when a]id where captured, when and where released, etc. 
After this we were shown to our rooms. And sucli rooms as 
they were. All the old maids in -the country could not have 
improved their spiclc-span neatness. The floors were as white 
as pine plank could be scoured ; the sheets and bedding as clean 
as cotton and linen and woolen could be washed. Nothing in any 
home in the land was any more daintdy, wholesomely, unquali- 




A STORY OF REBEL MILITARY I'KISONS. 629 

fiedly clean than were these little chambers, each containing 
two beds, one for each man assio;ned to iheir occupancy. 

Andrews doubted if we could stand all this radical change in 
our habits. lie feared that it was rushinor things too fast. "We 
might have had our hair cut one week, and taken a bath all 
over a week later, and so progress down to sleeping between 
white sheets m the course of six months, but to do it all in one 
day seemed like tempting fate. 

Every turn showed us some new feature of the marvelous 
order of this wonderful institution. Shortly after we were sent 
to our rooms, a Surgeon entered with a Clerk. After answering 
the usual questions as to name, rank, company and regiment, 
the Surgeon examined our tongues, eyes, limbs and general 
appearance, and communicated his conclusions to the Clerk, 
who filled out a blank card something like this : 

This card was stuck into a little 



No. lOL 
. Mc 



Co. L, 16th Iixs. Cat., 
Entered March , 1865. 

Diagnosis — General Debilitt. 

Prognosis — Favorable. 
Diet — No. 1. 



tin holder at the head of my bed. 
Andrews's card was the same, except 
the name. The Surgeon was fol- 
lowed by a Sergeant, who was 
Chief of the Dining-Room, and hie 
Clerk, who made a minute of the 
diet ordered for us, and moved off. 
Andrews and I immediately be- 
came very solicitous to know what species of diet No. 1 was. 
After the seasickness left us our appetites became as rav- 
enous as a buzz-saw, and unless Diet No. 1 was more than 
No. 1 in name, it would not fill the bill. We had not long to 
remain in suspense, for soon another non-commissioned officer 
passed through at the head of a train of attendants, bearing 
trays. Consulting the list in his hand, he said to one of his 
followers, " Two No. I's," and that satellite set down two large 
plates, upon each of which were a cup of coffee, a shred of meat, 
two boiled eggs and a couple of rolls. 

" "Well," said Andrews, as the procession moved away, " I 
want to know where this thing's going to stop. I am trying 
hard to get used to wearing a shirt without any lice in it, and 
to sitting down on a chair, and to sleeping in a clean bed, but 
when it comes to having my meals sent to my room, I'm afraid 
40 



626 



ANDEKSONVILLK. 



I'll degenerate into a pampered child of luxury. They are 
really piling it on too strong. Let us see, Mc. ; how long's it 
been since we were sitting on the sand there in Florence, boiling 
our pint of meal in that old can ? " 

" '^i. seems many years, Lale," I said ; " but for heaven's sake 





"l WANT TO KNOW WHERE THIS THINg's GOING TO STOP." 

let us try to forget it as soon as possible. We will always 
remember too much of it." 

And we did try hard to make the miserable recollections fade 
out of our minds. "When we were stripped on the balcony we 
threw away every visible token that could remind us of the 
hateful experience we had passed through. We did not retain a 
scrap of paper or a relic to recall the unhappy past. We 
loathed everything connected with it. 

The days that followed were very happy ones. The Pav 



▲ STOBY OP KEBRJL MILITAKT PKISONS. 627 

master came around and paid us each two months' pay and 
twenty-five cents a day " ration money " for every day we had 
been in prison. This gave Andrews and/1' about one hundred 
and sixty-live dollars apiece — an abundance of spending money. 
Uncle Sam was very kind and considerate to his soldier nephews, 
and the Ilospital authorities neglected nothing that would add 
to our comfort. The superbly-kept grounds of the Naval 
Academy w^ere renewing the freshness of their loveliness under 
the tender wooing of the advancing Spring, and every step one 
sauntered through them was a new delight. A magnificent 
band gave us sw^eet music morning and evening. Every dispatch 
from the South told of the victorious progress of our arms, and 
the rapid approach of the close of the struggle. All we had to 
do was to enjoy the goods the gods were showering upon us, 
and we did so with appreciative, thankful hearts. After awhile 
all able to travel were given furloughs of thirty days to visit 
their homes, with instructions to report at the expiration of 
their leaves of absence to the camps of rendezvous nearest their 
homes, and we separated, nearly every man going in a different 
direction. 



CHAPTEK LXXXI. 



BICLIQIOUS LIFE AKD WORK IN AITOEE80NYILLE HOW CAPTURED — 

IMPEE88ION8 ON REACHING THE PRISON HOW TREATED LOOK- 
ING FOR RELIGIOUS COMPAiTIONS NOTES FROM DAY TO DAT — 

COADJUTORS IN ORGANIZING PRATER MEETINGS BRUTAL TREAT- 
MENT OF THE SICK BY REBELS MEAGER RATIONS, ETC. 

By Rey. T. J. Sheppard, of Granville, O. 

Never can I forget the mingled emotions of surprise, mortifi- 
cation and horror which I experienced when, in the confusion 
of a night attack, I found myself hopelessly in the hands of the 

enemy. I thought I had 
considered every other 
chance of a soldier's fate 
when in the passion of patriot- 
ism I enlisted "for three 
years or the war." 

Bewildered by the imex- 
pectedness of the calamity, 
it was only after repeated 
and impatient orders that I 
relinquished my gun and 
cartridge box. Yet dazed as 
I was iu this regard, with 
respect to many surrounding 
circumstances, 1 never had more vivid impressions ; as witness 
the following : 

" That's my gun," cried one of the Rebels ; " that's my cart^ 
ridge box," said another ; " I take that haversack," cried a 




BOSTON CORBETT. 



A 8TOET OF EEBKL MILITAKT PBISONB. 629 

third, while the fourth dropped at my feet his old gray cap, 
whose external color suspiciously hinted of its internal furni- 
ture, seized my good hat and coolly remarked, " this wUl do for 
me." 

Such was my first intimate acquaintance with the Southern 
Chivalry. A few hours later I was much more kindly treated 
by a " Confederate Brigadier," and a fine soldierly looking fel- 
low from Texas hoped that my fears of long imprisonment and 
starvation might prove unfounded. But, on the whole, my 
experience was that the rays of human kindness which fell 
athwart the black horrors of the prison pens of the South, were 
indeed, " like angels' visits, few and far between." 

About 2 p. M., June 23, ISGtt, I, in company with about two 
hundred unfortunates, was turned like a wild beast into the 
" pen " at Anderson ville, Ga. There were given to us no shel- 
ter, no cooking utensils, no soap, no kettles for washing our 
clothing, no system of police to prevent crime or secure cleanli- 
ness, nothing save what we carried in on our backs. They pro- 
vided a twenty-foot Stockade and blood-hounds to prevent our 
escape, guards to shoot us if we crossed the Dead Line, rations, 
iuoh as they were, usually once in twenty-four hours, and — 
grcwes. 

As we entered that horrid place filled with ragged, dirty, 
diseased humanity, the sight was almost overpowering; but, 
having been at the time of my capture much impressed by the 
words of the heathen king to Daniel, "thy God whom thou 
servest continually, he will deliver thee," I tried to lean upon 
the Lord and seek " a heart for any fate." Corporal W. S. 
Moss, Seventh New York Heavy Artillery, having proposed to 
join with mine what shelter he had brought in, we became 
companions in suffering and partners in the possession of a rude 
tent. 

I spent much time in search of religious company, but without 
success till the night of July 8th, when, attracted by the singing 
of hymns, I found a large and attentive congregation gathered 
m a prayer and conference meeting. I was deeply impressed by 
the sight, as the faint light of the feeble tires feU on their ema- 
ciated forms clothed in rags, begrimed with dirt and disfigured 
by disease, their faces pinched with hunger, but radiant with 



630 Ain)££soi!iyiLLX. 

the presence of God. What words ©f Christian cheer they 
uttered in the very jaws of death 1 "What songs of triumphant 
faith floated out upon the air 1 "What words of holy trust rose 
in prayer to God I Never have I attended religious meetings 
where song and speech and prayer more fervently and fittingly 
expressed the riches of Christian experience. There was no 
cold formality which freezes devotion, and no luxurious ease 
which saps the vigor of piety. There no one need attend unless 
he wished to, and no one need stay away on account of personal 
appearance or social distinctions. 

My first sight of anything religious in that dismal place was 
while searching for religious companions, I found men engaged 
together in reading their Testaments. 

Upon becoming acquainted with Sergeant B. N. WaddeU, 
One Hundred and Twenty-Sixth Ohio Volunteer Infantry, Ken- 
ton, O., he informed me that he and some others started & 
prayer-meeting on the 29th of May, 1864. It was this begin- 
ning which had grown into the large assembly whose songs of 
devotion guided me to their place of meeting. Sergeant M. H. 
Miller, Twenty-Second Michigan Cavalry, McComb, Mich., haa 
since informed me that he and others organized a prayer-meeting 
in March, 1864. This must have been not more than one 
month after the arrival of the first prisoners at Andersonville. 
How seldom, even under the most favorable circumstances, haa 
any company of wanderers to a new clime established the 
public worship of God more promptly than did these unfortu- 
nate men herded in a loathsome prison. 

The " local habitation " of our public religious services was 
never fixed for any great length of time. We used to assemble 
on some vacant spot, and as the prison filled up move to 
another. A little before dark those who took a leading part, 
especially in singing, would repair to the place and " ring the 
bell," as we used to say, i.e., start some familiar hymn. Upon 
this the prisoners would gather often to the number of three car 
four hundred. We had the most beautiful singing, led by a 
trio of fine voices and joined by all present. The singing 
leaders in most of the meetings which I attended during the 
Summer and Fall of 1864 were Sergeant B. N. WaddeU, of the 
One Hundred and Twenty-Sixth Ohio Volunteer Infantry; J. 0. 



A BTOKT OF REBEL MILITAET PRISONS. 631 

Turner, of Townline, Lucerne County, Pa., and David Atherton, 
Company D, Sixty-Fifth New Yorli. I cannot find the regiment 
and company of Brother Turner in any memoranda I have. It 
seems to me now that their's were the sweetest voices I ever 
heard. One of them. Brother Waddell, has long since joined the 
choir which sings the eternal song of redeeming love amid the 
unfading glories of Heaven. He survived the cruelties of 
Andersonville and Florence only long enough to die heneath 
the starry folds of the flag for which he suffered so mucli. 
They used not only to lead our devotions, but also sometimes 
sung patriotic songs to intensely appreciative audiences of their 
fellow-prisoners until warned to desist by apprehension of 
danger from the guards. 

Having no facilities for singing except our memories and our 
voices, we used only the most familiar pieces. Such hymns as? 
" Come, thou fount of every blessing," "All hail the power of 
Jesus's name ! " "Jesus, lover of my soul," and, "A charge to 
keep I have," were most frequently used. Two others, which 
seemed especially appropriate to our situation, were sung again 
and again, always v»^ith the greatest feeling and truest comfort. 
They were : 

When I can read my title clear 

To mansions in the skies, 
I'll bid farewell to every fear, 

And wipe my weeping eyes. 

How many a pious soul feebly and uncertainly lingering within 
a starving body, poured forth its hopes of a better and more 
enduring life in the words of that old familiar hymn. Another, 
which expressed the hope of eternal joys beyond the grave, and, 
at the same time, in the chorus, furnished a vehicle for all the 
tenderness of feeling and intensity of longing, awakened by 
every thought of heme, seemed never to wear out. It was the 
one sung by so many at the Reunion of Prisoners, at Toledo, 
commencing; 

My heavenly home is bright and fair, 
No pain nor woe can enter there ; 
It's glittering towers the sun ontshine — 
That heavenly mansion shall be mine, 

I'm going home to die, no more ; 
To die no more ; to die no more ; 
I'm going home to die no more. 

If it be true that the human mind loves contrasts, how much 
more amid dirt, disease and death, far from friends and native 



633 ANDEBSOirVILLB. 

land, surrounded by bitter foes and daily expecting the most 
horrid of all deaths, must pious hearts have poured forth in 
that hymn their quenchless hope of a " better country ;" that is 
a heavenly one, and their abiding conviction of the mighty con- 
trast between Earth's most dreadful spot and Heaven's incom- 
parable glory. 

We usually had prayer meeting and preaching services on 
alternate nights. At the conclusion of all our meetings we 
invited within a ring, formed of the regular workers, all who 
desired their conversion to God, or their restoration to the joys 
of salvation. I find notices of this all along in my notes of 
the meetings : " Monday night, July 11 ; a memorable day in 
prison annals, six came out for praj'ei^s ; the next night eight, 
and on the 13th, ten — some inquirers and some backshders." 

I find the following recorded Sunda}^ July 17 : " Four en- 
quirers came out, one professed a change of heart and one was 
a backslider. To-day I received the names of six who have 
been converted since our meetings began." 

Sunday night, July 2-1, I find this record : " How blessed 
that, even in this abode of misery, Jesus meets his people and 
incHnes the hearts of many sinners to listen with serious atten- 
tion to His word. Seldom do any leave until the close of the 
meeting. Four gave their names as being converted during our 
meetings." 

From such notes occurring so often and from the number of 
names given to me, I have always supposed that, perhaps, one 
hundred conversions resulted from the meetings with which I 
was acquainted. As other meetings were held in other parts of 
the Stockade, the direct spiritual results must have been con- 
siderable. 

It will be interesting to note some of the places, at least, 
where meetings were held. I preached for the first time, 
Sunday, July 10, 1864, on the North Side, about half-way from 
east to west. The text was " Create in me a clean heart, O 
God; and renew a right spirit within me," Psalm li:10. On 
the South Side were two pine trees, the only ones, I think, in 
the Stockade. Possibly there was a small tree of some sort, 
not far from the South Gate. I preached several times at the 
two pines. 1 there became acquainted with Sergeant J. G. 
Miller, Company 15, Ninetieth Ohio Volunteer Infantry ; Cor- 



A. 6T0KT Of KEBEL MTLTTARY PRISONS. 633 

poral Rose, and Private ]\IcCollum. These and other brethren 
carried on a prayer meeting; at that point. I spoke there 
Thursday night, July 28, from. Eomans, xiv:l 2: " So then every 
one of us shall give account of himself to God." On that day 
a man was shot by a guard -while he was dipping up water 
from the brook. 

On the South Side, not very far from the brook, was a long 
house made with tent-poles and covered with pine boughs or 
possibly with blankets. This the Sixteenth Connecticut occu- 
pied. Robert II. Kellogg, Sergeant Major of that regiment, 
was one of our religious men. I remember preaching in front 
of that tent once from the words, " Their rock is not as our 
rock, our enemies themselves being judges," Deuteronomy, xxi. 
:32. In his book, " Life and Death in Rebel Prisons," Sergeant 
Kellogg speaks of a sermon which I preached Sunday night, 
July 17, from I. Timothy, vi:21 : " Fight the good fight of 
faith." That meeting was attended by an unusually large 
audience and was deeply interesting. It was on tlie South Side, 
but a httle way from the Dead Line, near a very large house or 
shanty which I think was called the " Masonic Tent." Sergeant 
Thomas A. Cord, of the Nineteenth United States Infantry, 
tented there. lie was one of the brethren whose acquaintance 
I formed on first finding my way to the meetings. One more 
extract from my diary wiU, I think, express the feelings of 
many others as well as myself. " I have now four preaching 
places. How blessed in this horrid place to be laboring for 
BouLs. How good such employment in prison and in distresb." 

•* WhUe blest with a sense of His lov« 
A palace a toy would appear, 
And prisons would palaces prove 
If Jesus would dwell with me there." 

So occupied was I at times with my interest in religious work 
as to shut out almost every other thought. I do not doubt 
that our work was a life-preserver even in the low sense of an 
occupation which prevented brooding over the horrors of the 
situation. The work had also a blessed effect on others. Acts 
xxvi:25, properly translated reads : " Paul and Silas were prais- 
ing God and the prisoners were hstening to them." This Bible 
experience of prison life was repeated in Anderson viUe. Says 



634 ANDER80NV1LLE. 

S. E. Sliarty, Company F, Sixty-Fifth Ohio Vohmteer Infantry : 
" I hved on the South Hill, when you preached on the North 
Side we, on the South Side, could hear you plainly." A, A. 
Spencer, Company E, Fifteenth Illinois Veteran Infantry, writes, 
" I have often thought of you during the last fourteen years. I 
have often told my friends of the religious meetings held in 
prison." "O. B. Campbell, Thirteenth Wisconsin, in a long 
and interesting letter, sa3^s that the\" had preaching in the 
prison at Cahawba, Ala., and also at Macon, Ga. O. B. Ches- 
ter, Company II, Tenth Wisconsin Infantry, speaks of the ser- 
mon from " Fight the good fight," etc, and says that he attended 
a prayer meeting at Anderson ville May 19, 1864. He heard 
preaching there for the last time March 19, 1865. This 
brother, as well as the writer of this sketch, returned to Ander- 
sonville in the Winter of 1864. The meetings were resumed in 
February, and closed with our final departure. I think it likely 
he heard the first and last sermon of the second series. Ser- 
geant J. G. MiUer writes: "I weU remember the many 
precious meetings we had there, and how they strengthened 
and cheered us. I have good reason to believe that many were 
trul}'' converted in that place of wretchedness. Yv^e had but 
few public prayer meetings after leaving Anderson ville, but we 
had a little hut or cave at Florence in which we had daily 
prayer." 

One of our Union Generals writes that at Libby rehgious 
services were kept up f©r some time by Chaplains. After they 
were released the meetings were continued with unabated inter- 
est by other officei's, especially Captain D. C. CaldweU, One 
Hundred and- Twenty-Third Ohio Volunteer Infantry. General 
Neal Dow was a frequent leader in their prayer meetings. 
They usually had prayer meeting and a short sermon on 
Wednesday night and two sermons on Sunday. My informant 
was confined there for nearly a year. 

Besides this work of maintaining religious services, much else 
could be mentioned of a religious and philanthropic character. 
Many of us met there each Sunday morning at sunrise to study 
the Word of God in a Bible c^ass. So we may lay at least 
some claim to having had an Anderson ville Sunday-School. The 
hour was not inconvenient in that place, a , nir couches possessed 



A. BTOET OF BEBEL MILITARY PRISONS. 635 

ao attractions especially preventive of early rising. We also 
visited the sick and dying. Brethren Waddell and Turner did 
much in that line. Frank W. Smith, now of the Toledo Railroad 
Bethel, was a frequent visitor to the sick and dying, as well as 
an active worker in our meetings. This work was constantly 
carried on by many. In numerous cases the sick were cared 
for by their mates as tenderly as was possible in such a place. 
I remember a boy I visited while sick and after his death, who 
was kept by his companions almost as clean and comfortable as 
if at home. 

One instance in my own experience illustrates how even these 
men were sometimes most thoughtfully alive to the dictates of 
humanity. My tent mate at that time was Joseph Quesnall, a 
mere boy, a French Canadian. A member of the same com- 
pany and regiment with Corporal Moss, he had upon his death 
come in as a sort of heir of his personal effects. Joe was the 
soul of faithfulness and unselfishness. The illustration of these 
traits on his part, which I am about to relate, was no doubt 
but one of hundreds known to Him who sees all hearts. 

Dm'ing Januar}"-, 1865, we were without even the imperfect 
shelter we had been accustomed to have. I took a cold, 
coughed much, and must have looked very badly. During the 
weary weeks no word of discouragement fell from his lips. 
With warmer suns and better shelter I recovered my usual 
prison health. Then he said one day : " Sergeant, I was afraid 
for awhile that you would not stay with us much longer." 

An organization was formed to clear the way for tiie sick 
and carry cool water to them. By the clumsy barbarity of 
Rebel arrangement, all the sick unable to walk had to be 
dragged through heat and dust to the South Gate. My blood 
never boiled hotter than when I saw daily the long line of 
cripples crawling along, or the still more helpless borne on the 
backs of comrades or on blankets, while every movement was 
agony, and many died upon the way. Yet this daily torment 
was the price of a Rebel prescription. Frequently, from some 
cans?, no doctors would be at the gate. In that case I never 
knew any notice to be given to prevent the pilgrima^ge of pain, 
but the sick would come and he around in the hot sun for 



636 ANDEE80NVILLK. 

hours, only at length to go groaning back to their miserable 
huts. To such a cup of cool water was a boon indeed. 

I was often called upon to hold burial services. After the 
first two or three deaths in my ninety, I resolved that each 
should have that mark of respect as long as I had the strength 
to give it. One of the saddest deaths I saw there was that of 
Edward Shoulder, Compiiny II, Second Delaware. lie was a 
man I think about middle age, a quiet, unobtrusive Christian. 
"With him starvation brought on delirium. He would start up, 
grasp my hand and then fall back with incoherent words or an 
empty laugh. One of the most quiet deaths I saw was that of 
Corporal W. S. Moss, my tent mate. Pie was, apparently, 
religious and always inclined to be thankful that things were no 
worse. His last words were : " What a cool breeze." Lyman 
Gregory, also of the Seventh New York Heavy Artillery, and 
a tent mate, told me, a httle before his death, that he had been 
trying to live a Christian life. The happiest death I witnessed 
was that of Andrew Smith, Seventh Pennsylvania. His death 
was one of triumphant joy. He seemed fully prepared to go. 
I attended his funeral on the same day as that of Sergeant 
La Yerne, mentioned by Sergeant Kellogg in his book. Others 
I did not see die, but know of their spiritual state. The first was 
John Lanson, of Taylorsville, O. He told me, perhaps a week 
before his death, that he " had a building, not made with hands, 
eternal in the heavens." It was his — 

• • * "a happier lot to own 
A heavenly mansion near the throne 1 " 

I knew Brother Achison, Ninth Minnesota, a Local Methodist 
Preacher, who died there. Brother Gardiner, One Hundred 
and Thirty-Fifth Ohio, was a man of noble spirit. A member 
of his church was drafted. He had a family and could not bear 
to leave them. So Brother Gardiner went in the place of this 
friend, and died at Florence, S. C. If not the original of 
Beecher's story, " He Died for Me," he might well have been. 

I know of no test of real piety more severe than that applied 
by life in Andersonville and other prisons. We know how 
many men were demoralized by army life. In the almo>»t 



A STORY OF REBEL MILITARY PRISONS. 637 

entire absence of moral restraint and constant exposure to vicious 
companions, their morals gave way, and their want of real 
goodness was manifested. All that army life was for evil, that 
and tenfold more was the life in the prison pen. There was 
in the prison even less moral restraint. The stern, all-present 
necessity of preserving his own life, constantly tended to foster 
utter indifference as to others' good, and quench every noble 
impulse of humanity. The intense suffering, the horrifying sights, 
and the seeming hojoelessness of relief, save in death, constantly 
tempted us to conclude that there was in all the Universe no 
" power that makes for righteousness." For myself I can say that 
I only followed the dictates of a heart that longed for Christian 
fellowship, and the teachings of a Gospel which impelled me, 
in at least a feeble way, to imitate Ilim who " came not to be 
ministered to, but to minister, and to give Ilis life as a ransom 
for many." But as I look back upon it now, I am amazed that 
any considerable body of men should there have kept up 
Christian faith, hope and zeal. And that they not only did not 
give up in despair, " curse God and die," but lived and labored, 
and when death did come, even in most horrid form, 

Crossed the River of Jordan, 
Triumphant in the Lord, 

I believe to be one of the grandest testimonies that the 
religion of Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God, 
that it can sustain men amid the darkest woes of earth and fit 
them for the brightest glories of heaven. 

In closing this imperfect sketch of Religious Life and Work 
in Andersonville, I regret that I did not preserve more names 
of pious friends. I can only give such as I now have. This list 
does not include those already mentioned, nor those professing 
conversion there. I met there in meetings Thomas B. Bourne, 
Company II, Fifty-Eighth Massachusetts ; Corporal L. II. Cum- 
mings, "Webster, Massachusetts ; John W. Kerr, One Hundredth 
Pennsylvania; Daniel Curlan, Maryland Cavalry; Sergeant 
Henry Knipp, Company G, Ninth Maryland; George "W. 
Pomeroy, Company A, Ninth Minnesota ; George A. Hovey, 
Seventeenth Iowa; Wm. M. Sweezy, Ft. Madison, Iowa; R. 
N. Kidder, Wilkesbarre, Pa. ; M. M. Young, Mt. Hope, Holmei 



638 AJS'UtK'oUJS ViLLh. 

County, O. ; John B. Sutton, Company B, Fifty-Fourth Ohio. 
Z. F. Wood, Company I, Seventeenth Iowa, I was frequently 
with in relio^ious work. He was a minister, I think, of the > 
Methodist denomination. Boston Corbett I also knew, as a 
participator in our meetings. 

ISTow, while all loyal hearts must ever abhor the diabolism of 
the Slavery rebellion, by which so many brave men found 
untimely graves amid the sands of the South, w^ho can fail to 
rejoice at the earnest Christian labors of prisoners at Anderson- 
ville and other Southern pens, and may we not believe that 
when Jesus comes in all the glory of his final advent to gather 
his jewels, it may be said of many precious souls thus born to 
heavenly joys amid the deepest woes of earth, " These are they 
who have come up through great tribulation and washed their 
robes w^hite in the blood of the Lamb ? " 



111 



A. i!iv^ „ .^.r. m 6i^^.5 ^,rf 




a- 




THE CEMETERY AT ANDERSOITV^ILLE. 
A* placed in order by tlie party tmder charge of Miss Clara Barton. 



CHAPTER LXXXIL 

OAPTAm WEKZ THE ONLY ONE OF THE rEISON-KEEPERS PUNISHED — 
HIS AEKEST, TRIAL AND EXECUTION. 

Of all those more or less concerned in the barbarities prac- 
ticed upon our prisoners, but one — Captain Henry Wirz — was 
punished. The Turners, at Richmond ; Lieutenant Boisseux, of 
Belle Isle ; Major Gee, of Salisbury ; Colonel Iverson and 
Lieutenant Barrett, of Florence ; and the many brutal miscreants 
about Anderson ville, escaped scot free. What became of them 
no one knows ; they were never heard of after the close of the 
war. They had sense enough to retire into obscurity, and stay 
there, and this saved their lives, for each one of them had made 
deadly enemies among those whom they had maltreated, who, 
had they known where they were, would have wallied every 
step of the way thither to kill them. 

"When the Confederacy went to pieces in April, 1865, Wirz 
^\"as still at AndersonviUe. General Wilson, commanding our 
cavalry forces, and who had established his headquarters at 
Macon, Ga., learned of this, and sent one of his staff — Captrin 
H. E. Noyes, of the Fourth Regular Cavalry — with a squad 
of men, to arrest him. This was done on the 7th of May. 
Wirz protested against his arrest, claiming that he was pro- 
tected by the terms of Johnson's surrender, and addressed the 
following letter to General Wilson : 

Andbrsoitville, Ga., May 7, 1865. 
General : — It is with great reluctance that I address you these lines, being 
fully aware how little time is left you to attend to such matters as I now have 
flip iwvvir to lay before you, and if I could see any other way to accomplisb 



640 AmOEKSONVILLB. 



I 



my object I would not intrude upon you. I am a native of Switzerland, and 
was before the war a citizen of Louisiana, and by profession a pliysician. 
Like hundreds and thousands of others, I was carried away by the maelstrom 
of excitement and joined the Southern army. I was very severely wounded 
at the battle of "Seven Pines," near Richmond, Va., and have nearly lost the 
use of my right arm. Unfit for field duty, I wa^ ordered to report to Brevet 
Major General John H. Winder, in charge of the Federal prisoners of war, 
who ordered me to take charge of a prison in Tuscaloosa, Ala. My health 
failing me, I applied for a furlough and went to Europe, from whence I 
returned in Februarj', 1804. I was then ordered to report to the commandant 
of the military prison at Andersouville, Ga., who assigned me to the com- 
mand of the interior of the prison. The duties I had to perform were ardu- 
ous and unpleasant, and I am satisfied that no man can or will justly blame 
me for things that happened here, and which were beyond my power to con- 
trol. I do not think that I ought to be held responsible for the shortness of 
rations, for the overcrowded state of the prison, (which was of itself a pro- 
lific source of fearful mortulit}^, for the inadequate supply of clothing, want 
of shelter, etc., etc. Still I now bear the odium, and men who were prisoners 
have seemed disposed to wreak their vengeance upon me for what they have 
Buffered — I, who was only the medium, or, I may better say, the tool in the 
hands of my superiors. This is my condition. I am a man with a family. 
I lost all my property when the Federal army besieged Vicksburg. I have 
no money at present to go to any place, and, even if I had, I know of no 
place where I can go. My life is in danger, and I most respectfully 
ask of you Lelp and relief. If you will be so generous as to give me 
some sort of a safe conduct, or, what I should greatly prefer, a guafd to 
protect myself and family against violence, I should be thankful to you : and 
you may rest assured that your protection will not be given to one who is 
unworthy of it. My intention is to return with my family to Europe, as 
Boon as I can make tbs arrangements. In the meantime I have the honor^ 
General, to remain, very respectfully, your obedient servant, 

Ht. Wibz, Captain C. S. A. 
Major General J. H. Wilson, 

. Commanding, Macon, Ga. 

He was kept at Macon, under guard, until May 20, when 
Captain Noyes was ordered to take him, and the hospital 
records of Andersonville, to Washington. Between Macon 
and Cincinnati the journey was a perfect gauntlet. 

Our men were stationed all along the road, and among them 
everywhere were ex-prisoners, who recognized Wirz, and made 
such determined efforts to kill him that it was all that Captain 
Noyes, backed by a strong guard, could do to frustrate them. 
At Chattanooga and I^ashville the struggle between his guards 
4ind his would-be slayers, was quite sharp. 

At Louisville, Noyes had "Wirz clean-shaved, and dressed in a 



A STORY OF REBEL MILITARY PRISONS. 641 

complete suit of black, with a beaver hat, which so altered his 
appearance that no one recognized him after that, and the rest 
of the journey was made unmolested. 

The authorities at Wasliington ordered that he be tried 
immediately, by a court martial com^sed of Generals Lewis 
Wallace, Mott, Geary, L. Thomas, Fessenden, Bragg and Bai- 
ler, Colonel Allcock, and Lieutenant-Colonel Stibbs. Colonel 
Chipman was Judge Advocate, and the trial began August 23. 

The prisoner was arraigned on a formidable list of charges 
and specifications, which accused him of "combining, confeder- 
ating, and conspiring togetiier with John II. "Winder, Richard 
B. Winder, Isaiah II. White, W. S. Winder, E. R. Stevenson 
and others unknown, to injure the health and destroy the lives 
of soldiers in the militar}^ service of the United States, there 
held, and being pi'isoners of war within the lines of the so-called 
Confederate States, and in the militar}'' prisons thereof, to the 
end that the armies of the United States raisrht be weakened 
and impaired, in violation of the hiNvs and customs of war." The 
main facts of the dense over-crowding, the lack of sufficient 
shelter, the hideous mortality were cited, and to these added a 
long list of specific acts of brutality, such as hunting men down 
with hounds, tearing them with dogs, robbing them, confining 
them in the stocks, cruelly beating and murdering thera, of 
which Wirz was personally guilty. 

When the defendant was called upon to plead he claimed 
that his case was covered by the terms of Johnston's surrender, 
and furthermore, that the country now being at peace, he could 
not be lawfully tried by a court-martial. These objections 
being overruled, he entered a plea of not guilty to all the 
charires and specifications, lie had two lawyers for counsel. 

The pros3cution called Captain Noyes first, who detailed the 
circumstances of Wirz's arrest, and denied that he had given 
any promises of yirotection. 

The next witness was Colonel George C. Gibbs, who com- 
manded the troops of the post at Anderson vi lie. lie testified 
that AYirz was the commandant of the prison, and had sole 
authority under Winder over all the prisoners ; that there was 
a Dead Line there, and orders to shoot any one who crossed it; 
that dogs were kept to hunt down esca})ing prisoners ; the dogs 
were the ordinary plantation dogs, mixture of hound and cur. 
■if 



642 



ANDEBSONVILLK. 



Dr. J. C. Bates, who was a Surgeon of the Prison Hospitaly 
(a Eebel), testified that the condition of things in his division 
was horrible. Nearly naked men, covered with lice, were dying 
on all sides. Many were lying in the filthy sand and mud. 




%; .^ TRIAL OF CAPTAIN WIRZ. 
From a Sketch in Harper's Weekly, made at the time. 

lie went on and described the terrible condition of men — djnng 
from scurvy, diarrhea, gangrenous sores, and lice He wanted 
to carrv in fresh vegetables for the sick, but did not dare, the 
orders being very strict against such things. He thought the 
prison authorities might easily have sent in enough green corn 
to have stopped the scurvy ; the miasmatic eflluvia from the 
prison was exceedingly offensive and poisonous, so much so that 
when the Surgeons received a slight scratch Qu-th^ir persons, 
they carefully covered it up with court plaster, before venturing 
near the prison. 

A number of other Rebel Surgeons testified to substantially 
the same facts. Several residents of that section of the Stat© 
testified to the plentifulness of the crops there in 1864. 

In addition to these, about one hundred and fifty Union pris^ 



A STOKY OF REBEL iillLITAKY TKISONS. 



e>43 



oners were examined, who testified to all manner of barbarities 
which had come under their personal observation. They had 
all seen "Wirz shoot men, had seen him knock sick and crippled 




EXECUTION OF WIRZ LOWERmO THE BODY. 

(Prom a sketch in Harper's Weekly made on G ^/Hfot.) 

men down and stamp upon them, had been run down by him 
with hounds, etc. Their testimony occu]")ies about two thousand 
pao-es of manuscript, and is, without doubt, the most terrible 
record of crime ever laid to the account of any man. 

The taking of this testimony occupied until October 18, 
when the Government decided to close the case, as any further 
evidence would be simply cumulative. 

The prisoner presented a statement in which he denied that 
there had been an accomplice in a conspiracy of John II. Winder 
and others, to destroy the lives of United States soldiers ; he 
also denied that there had been such a conspiracy, but made the 
pertinent inquiry why he alone, of all those who were charged 
with the conspiracy, was brought to trial. He said that 
''Winder has gone to the great judgn'^nt seat, to answer for 
all his thoughts, words and deeds, and suroly I am not to be 
held culpable for them. General How oil Cobb has received 



644 AJ^DEKSONVILLE. 

the pardon of the President of the United States." He further 
claimed that there was no principle of law which would sanction 
the holdino; of him — a mere subordinate — guilty, for simply 
obeying, as literally as possible, the orders of his superiors. 

He denied all the specific acts of cruelty alleged against him, 
such as maltreating and killing prisoners with his own hands. 
The prisoners killed for crossing the Dead Line, he claimed^ 
should not be charged against him, since they were simply 
punished for the violation of a known order which formed part 
of the discipline, he believed, of all military prisons. The state- 
ment that soldiers were given a furlough for killing a Yankee 
prisoner, was declared to be " a mere idle, absurd camp rumor." 
As to the lack of shelter, room and rations for so many prison- 
ers, he claimed that the sole responsibility rested upon the Con- 
federate Government. There never were but two prisoners 
whipped by his order, and these were for sufficient cause. lie 
asked the Court to consider favorably two important items in 
his defense : first, that he had of his own accord taken the 
drummer boys from the Stockade, and placed them where they 
could get purer air and better food. Second, that no property 
taken from prisoners was retained by him, but M^as turned over 
to the Prison Quartermaster. 

The Court, after due deliberation, declared the prisoner 
guilty on all the charges and specifications save two unimpor- 
tant ones, and sentenced him to be hanged by the neck until 
dead, at such time and place as the President of the United 
States should direct. 

ISTovember 3 President Johnson approved of the sentence, 
and ordered Major General C. C. Augur to carry the same into 
effect on Friday, November 10, which was done. The prisoner 
made frantic appeals against the sentence ; he wrote imploring 
letters to President Johnson, and lying ones to the Kew York 
li^ews, a Pebel paper. It is said that his wife attempted to con- 
vey poison to him, that he might commit suicide and avoid the 
ignoray of being hanged. When all hope was gone he nerved 
himself up to meet his fate, and died, as thousands of other 
scoundrels have, with calmness. His body was buried in the 
grounds of the Old Capitol Prison, alongside of that of Azterodt, 
one of the accomplices in the assassination of President 
Lincoln. 



CHAPTEK LXXXIII. 

IHB KESPONSIBILITT WHO WAS TO BLAME FOR ALL THE inSEET 

AN EXAillNATION OF THE FLIMSY EXCUSES MADE FOR THE REBELS 

ONE DOCUMENT THAT CONVICTS THEM WHAT IS DESIRED. 

I have endeavored to tell the foregoing story as calmly, as 
dispassionately, as free from vituperation and prejudice as possi- 
ble. IIow well I have succeeded the reader must judge. IIow 
difficult this moderation has been at times only those know 
who, like myself, have seen, from day to day, the treason-sharp- 
ened fangs of Starvation and I"*isease gnaw nearer and nearer 
to the hearts of well-beloved friends and comrades. Of the 
sixty-three of my company comrades who entered prison with 
m*^, but eleven, or at most thirteen, emerged alive, and several 
of these have since died from the effects of what they suffered. 
The mortality in the other companies of our battalion was 
equally great, as it was also with the prisoners generally. Not 
less than twenty-five thousand gallant, noble-hearted boys died 
around me between the dates of my capture and release. Nobler 
men than they never died for an}'^ cause. For the most part 
they were simple-minded, honest-hearted loys; the sterling pro- 
ducts of our Northern home-life, and Northern Common 
Schools, and that grand stalwart Northern blood, the yeoman 
blood of sturdy middle class freemen — the blood of the race 
which has conquered on every field since the Roman Emjjire 
went down under its sinewy blows. They prated little of honor, 
and knew nothing of "chivalry" except in its repulsive travesty 
in the South. As citizens at home, no honest labor had been 
regarded by them as too humble to be followed Avith manly 
pride in its success ; as soldiers in the field, they did their duty 
with a calm defiance of danger and death, that the world hub 



646 ANDERSONVILLE. 

not seen equaled in the six thousand years that men have 
followed the trade of war. In the prison their conduct was 
marked by the same unostentatious but unflinching heroism. 
Death stared them in the face constantly. They could read their 
own fate in that of the loathsome, unburied dead all around 
them. Insolent enemies mocked their sufferings, and sneered 
at their devotion to a Government which they asserted had aban- 
doned them, but the simple faith, the ingrained honesty of 
these plain-mannered, plain-spoken boys rose superior to every 
trial. Brutus, the noblest Iloraan of them all, sa^'s in his 
grandest flight: 

Set honor in one eye and death in the other, 
And I will look on both indillerently. 

They did not say this : they did it. They never questioned 
their duty ; no repinings, no murmurings against their Govern- 
ment escaped their lips, they took the dread fortunes brought 
to them as calmly, as unshrinkingly as they had those in the 
field ; they quailed not, nor wavered in their faith before the 
worst the Rebels could do. The finest epitaph ever inscribed 
above a soldier's grave was that graven on the stone which 
marked the resting-place of the deathless three hundred who 
fell at Thermopylae — 

Go, stranger, to Laceda^nion — 

And tell Sparta that we lie here in obedience to her laws. 

They who lie in the shallow graves of Anderson ville, Belle 
Isle, Florence and Salisbury, lie there in obedience to the pre- 
cepts and maxims inculcated into their minds in the churches 
and Common Schools of the l^s'orth ; precepts which impressed 
upon them the duty of manliness and honor in all the relations 
and exigencies of life ; not the " chivalric " prate of their 
enemies, but the calm steadfastness which endureth to the end. 
The highest tribute that can be pa'd them is to say they did 
full credit to their teachings, and they died as ever3'' American 
should when duty bids him. No richer heritage was ever 
bequeathed to posterity. 

It was in the year 1864, and the first three months of 1866 
that these twenty-five thousand youths ?\'ere cruelly and need- 
lessly done to death. In these fatal fifteen months more young 
men than to-day form the pride, the hope, and the vigor of any 
one of our leading Cities, more than at the beginning of the 



A STORY OF REBEL MILITARY PRISONS. 647 

war were found in either of several States in the Kation, were 
sent to their graves, " unknellcd, iincoflined, and unknown," vic- 
tims of the most barbarous and unnecessary cruelty recorded 
since the Dark Ages. Barbarous, because the wit of man has 
not yet devised a more savage method of destro3'ing fellow- 
beings than by exposure and starvation ; unnecessary, because 
the destruction of these had not, and could not have the slight- 
est eliect upon the result of the struggle. The Eebel leaders 
have acknowledged that they kncAV the fate of the Confederacy 
was sealed when the campaign of ISG-i opened with the Korth 
displaying an unflinching determination. to prosecute the war to 
a successful conclusion. All that the}' could hope for after that 
was some fortuitous accident, or unexpected foreign recognition 
that would give them peace with victory. The prisoners were 
non-important factors in the military problem. Had they all 
been turned loose as soon as captured, their efforts would not 
have hastened the Confederacy's fate a single day. 

As to the responsibility for this monstrous cataclyism of hu- 
man misery and death : That the great mass of the Southern 
people approved of these outrages, or even kncAv of them, I do 
not, for an instant, believe. They are as little capable of coun- 
tenancing such a thing as any people in the world. But the 
crowning blemish of Southern society has ever been the dumb 
acquiescence of the many respectable, well-disposed, right- 
thinking people in the acts of the turbulent and unscrupulous 
few. From this direful spring has flowed an Iliad of unnum- 
bered woes, not only to that section but to our common country. 
It was this that kept the South vibrating between patriotism 
and treason during the lievolution, so that it cost more lives 
and treasure to maintain the struggle there than in all the rest 
of the country. It was this that threatened the dismemberment 
of the Union in 1832. It was this that aggravated and enven- 
omed every wrong growing out of Slavery ; that outraged 
liberty, debauched citizenship, plundered the mails, gagged the 
press, stifled speech, made oj^inion a crime, polluted the free 
soil of God with the unwilling step of the bondman, and at 
last crowned three-quarters of a century of this unparalleled 
iniquity by dragging eleven millions of peojjle into a war 
from which, their souls revolted, and against which they had 
declared by overwhelming majorities in every State except 



648 AlfDERSONVILLK. 

South Carolina, where the people had no voice. It may puzzle 
some to understand how a relatively small band of political 
desperados in each State could accomplish such a momentous 
wrong ; that they did do it, no one conversant with our history 
will deny, and that they — insignificant as they were in num- 
bers, in abilities, in character, in everj^thing save capacity and 
indomitable energy in mischief — could achieve such gigantic 
wrongs in direct opposition to the better sense of their commu- 
nities is a fearful demonstration of the defects of the constitu- 
tion of Southern society. 

Men capable of doing all that the Secession ]ea(U3rs were 
guilty of — both before and during the war — were quite 
capaljle of revengefully destroying twenty-five thousand of 
their enemies by the most hideous means at their command. 
That they did so set about destroying their enemies, wilfully, 
maliciousl}'', and witli malice prepense and aforethought, is 
susceptible of proof as conclusive as tliat which in a criminjd 
court sends murderers to the gallows. 

Let us examine some of these proofs : 

1. The terrible mortality at Anderson ville and elsewliere was 
a matter of as much notoriety throughout the Southern Con- 
federacy as the military operations of Lee and Johnson. No 
intelligent man — much less the Rebel leaders — was ignorant 
of it nor of its calamitous proportions. 

2. Had the Rebel leaders within a reasonable time after this 
matter became notorious made some show of inquiring into 
and alleviating the deadly misery, there might be some excuse 
for them on the ground of lack of information, and the plea 
that they did as well as they could would have some validity. 
But this state of alrairs was allowed to continue over a year — 
in fact until the downfall of the Confederacy — without a hand 
being raised to 'mitigate the horrors of those places — without 
even an inquiry being made as to whether they were mitigable 
or not. Still worse : ever}^ month saw the horrors thicken, and 
the condition of the prisoners become more wretched. 

The suffering in May, 1864, was more terrible than in April ; 
June showed a frightful increase over May, while words fail to 
paint the horrors of July and August, and so the wretchedness 
waxed until the end, in April, 1865. 

3. The main causes of suffering and death were so obviously 



A 8TOBT OF BKBKL MU-ITAllY PRISONS. H4& 

preventible that the Kebel leaders could not have been ignorant 
of the ease with which a remedy could be applied. These main 
causes were three in number : 

a. Improper and insufficient food. 

h. Unheard-of crowdinf^ together. 

c. Utter lack of shelter. 
It is difficult to say which of these three was the most deadly. 
Let us admit, for the sake of argument, that it was impossible 
for the Eebels to supply sufficient and proper food. This 
admission, I know, will not stand for an instant in the face of 
the revelations made by Sherman's March to the Sea, and 
through the Carolinas, but let that pass, that we may consider 
more easily demonstrable facts connected with the next two 
propositions, the first of which is as to the crowding together. 
"Was land so scarce in the Southern Confederacy that no more 
than sixteen acres could be spared for tlie use of thirty-five 
thousand prisoners ? The State of Georgia has a population of 
less than one-sixth that of New York, scattered over a territory 
one-quarter greater than that State's, and yet a pitiful little 
tract — less than the corn-patch "clearing" of the laziest 
" cracker " in the State — was ail that could be allotted to the 
use of three-and-a-half times ten thousand young men I The 
average population of the State does not exceed sixteen to the 
square mile, yet Andersonville was peopled at the rate of one 
million four hundred thousand to the square mile. AVith millions 
of acres of unsettled, useless, worthless pine barrens all around 
them, the prisoners were wedged together so closely that there 
was scarcely room to lie down at night, and a few had space 
enough to have served as a grave. This, too, in a country 
where the land was of so little worth that much of it had never 
been entered from the Government. 

Then, as to shelter and fire : Each of the prisons was situated 
in the heart of a primeval forest, from which the first trees that 
had ever been cut were those used in building the pens. Within 
a gun-shot of the perishing men was an abundance of lumber 
and wood to have built every man in prison a warm, comforta- 
ble hut, and enough fuel to supply all his wants. Supposing 
even, that the Hebels did not have the labor at hand to convert 
these forests into building material and fuel, the prisoners them- 



650 ANDERSON VILI.E. 

selves would have gladly undertaken the work, as a means of 
promoting their own comfort, and for occujiation and exercise. 
No tools would have been too poor and clumsy for them to 
work with. When logs were occasionally found or brought 
into prison, men tore them to pieces almost with their naked 
fingers. Every prisoner will bear me out in the assertion that 
there was probably not a root as lai'ge as a bit of clothes-line 
in all the ground covered by the prisons, that eluded the faith- 
fully eager search of freezing men for fuel. AVhat else than 
deliberate design can account for this systematic withholding 
from the prisoners of that which was so essential to their exist- 
ence, and which it was so easy to give them? 

This much for the circumstantial evidence connecting the 
Kebel authorities with the premeditated plan for destroying the 
prisoners. Let us examine the direct evidence : 

The first feature is the assignment to the command of the 
prisons of " General " John II. "Winder, the confidential friend 
of Mr. Jefferson Davis, and a man so unscrupulous, cruel and 
bloody-thirsty that at the time of his a]:)pointment he was the 
most hated and feared man in the Southern Confederacy. His 
odious administration of the odious oflice of Provost Marshal 
General showed him to be fittest of tools for their purpose. 
Their selection — considering the end in vievi^, was eminently 
wise. Baron Ilaynau was made eternally infamous by a frac- 
tion of the wanton cruelties which load the memory of Winder. 
But it can be said in extenuation of Ilaynau's offenses that he 
was a brave, skilful and energetic soldier, who overthrew on 
the field the enemies he maltreated. If Winder, at any time 
during the war, was nearer the front than Richmond, history 
does not mention it. Haynau was the bastard son of a Ger- 
man Elector and of the daughter of a village druggist. Winder 
was the son of a sham aristocrat, whose cowardice and incom- 
petence in the war of 1S12 gave Washington into the hands of 
the British ravagers. 

It is sufficient indication of this man's character that he 
could look unmoved upon the terrible suffering that prevailed 
in Anderson ville in June, July, and August ; that he could see 
three thousand men die each month in the most horrible man- 
ner, without lifting a finger in any way to assist them ; that he 



A. 8TOET OF EEBEL MILITARY PRISONS. 661 

cotild call attention in a self-boastful way to the fact that " I 

am killing off more Yankees than twenty regiments in Lee's 

Arm}'^," and that he could respond to the suggestions of the 

horror-struck visiting Inspector that the prisoners be given at 

least more room, with the assertion that he intended to leave 

matters just as they were — the operations of death would soon 

thin out the crowd so that the survivors would have sufficient 

room. 

It was Winder who issued this order to the Commander of 

the Artillery ; 

Headquarters Military Prison, ) 

Anderson viLLE, Ga., July 27, 1864 ) 
Order Ko. 13. 

The officers on duty and in charge of the Battery of Florida Artillery at ' 
the time Tvili, upon receiving notice that tlie enemy has approached within 
seven miles of this post, open upon the Stockade with grapeshot, without 
reference to the situation beyond these lines of defense. 

JoriN H. Winder, 
Brigadier General Commanding. 

Diabolical is the only word that will come at all near fitly 
characterizing such an infamous order. What must have been 
the nature of a man who would calmly order twenty-five guns 
to be opened with grape and canister at two hundred yards 
range, upon a mass of thirty thousand prisoners, mostly sick 
and dying ! All this, rather than suffer them to be rescued by 
their friends. Can there be any terms of reprobation suffi- 
ciently strong to properly denounce so malignant a monster? 
Ilistory has no parallel to him, save among the blood-reveling 
kings of Dahomey, or those sanguinary Asiatic chieftains who 
built pyramids of human skulls, and paved roads with men's 
bones. How a man bred an American came to display such a 
Timour-like thirst for human life, such an Orieijtal contempt 
for the sufferings of others, is one of the mysteries that per- 
plexes me the more I study it. 

If the Rebel leaders who appointed this man, to whom he 
reported direct, without intervention of superior officers, and 
who were fully informed of all his acts through other sources 
than himself, were not responsible for him, who in Heaven's 
name was ? IIow can there be a possibility that they were not 
cognizant and approving of his acts ? 



652 



ANDKR80NVILLK. 



The Rebels have attempted but one defense to the terribk 
charges against them, and that is, that our Government per- 
sistently refused to exchange, preferring to let its men rot in 
prison to yielding up the Rebels it held. This is so utterly 
false as to be absurd. Our Government made overture after 
overture for exchange to the Rebels, and offered to yield many 
of the points of difference. But it could not, with the least 
consideration for its own honor, yield up the negro soldiers and 
their officers to the unrestrained brutality of the Rebel authori- 
ties, nor could it, consistent with military prudence, parole the 
one hundred thousand well-fed, well-clothed, able-bodied Rebels 
held by it as prisoners, and let them appear inside of a week 
.in front of Grant or Sherman. Until it would a^jree ro do this 
the Rebels would not agree to exchange, and the only motive 
— save revenge — which could have inspired the Rebel mal- 
treatment of the prisoners, was the expectation of raising such 
a clamor in the North as would force the Government to con- 
sent to a disadvantageous exchange, and to give back to the 
Confederacy, at its most critical period one hundred thousand 
fresh, able-bodied soldiers. It was for this purpose, probably, 
that our Government and the Sanitary Commission were 
refused all permission to send us food and clothing. For my 
part, and I know I echo the feelings of ninety-nine out of 
every hundred of my comrades, I would rather have staid in 
prison till I rotted, than that our Government should have 
yielded to the degradmg demands of insolent Rebels. 

There is one document in the possession of the Government 
which seems to me to be unanswerable proof, both of tlie settled 
policy of the Richmond Government towards the Union prison- 
ers, and of the relative merits of Northern and Southern treat- 
ment of captives. The document is a letter reading as follows : 

City Point, Va., Maich 17, 1863. 

Sir : A flag-of-truce boat has arrived with three hundred and fifty political 
prisoners. General Barow and several other prominent men among them. 

I wish you to send me on four o'clock Wednesday morning, all the military 
prisoners {except officers), and all the political prisoners you have. If any of 
the political prisoners have on hand proof enough to convict them of being 
spies, or of having committed other offenses which should subject them to 
punishment, so state opposite their names. Also, state whether you think, 
under all the circumstances, they should be released. TJu arrangement I have 



A 8T0KT OF REBEL MILITAKT PEIB0N8. 698 

mad€ teorks largely in our famr. We get kid of a set of misbrabui 

WRKTCnES, AND RECEIVE SOME OF THE BEST MATERIAL I EVER SAW. 

Tell Captain Turner to put down on the list of political prisoners the names 
of Edward P. Eggling, and Eugenia Hammermister. The President is anxious 
that they should get off. They are here now. This, of course, is between 
ourselves. If you have any political prisoners whom you can send off safely 
to keep her company, I would like you to send her. 

Two hundred and odd more political prisoners are on their way. 

I would be more full in my communication if I had time. Yours truly, 

Robert Ould, Commissioner of Exchange. 

To Brigadier General John H. Vt'inder. 

But, supposing that our Government, for good military 
reasons, or for no reason at all, declined to exchange prisoners, 
what possible excuse is that for slaughtering them by exquisite 
tortures? Every Government has an unquestioned right to 
decline exchanging when its military policy suggests such a 
course ; and such declination conveys no right whatever to the 
enemy to slay those prisoners, either outright with the edge of 
the sword, or more slowly by inhuman treatment. The Rebels' 
attempts to justify their conduct by the claim that our Govern- 
ment refused to accede to their wishes in a certain respect, ia 
too preposterous to be made or listened to by intelligent men. 

The whole affair is simply inexcusable, and stands out a foul 
blot on the memory of every Eebel in high place in the Con- 
federate Government. 

" Yengeance is mine," saith the Lord, and by Ilim must this 
great crime be avenged, if it ever is avenged. It certainly 
transcends all human power. I have seen little indication of 
any Divine interposition to mete out, at least on this earth, 
adequate punishment to those who were the principal agents in 
that iniquity. Howell Cobb died as peacefully in his bed as 
any Christian in the land, and with as few apparent twinges of 
remorse as if he had spent his life in good deeds and prayer. 
The arch-fiend Winder died in equal tranquility, murmuring 
some cheerful hope as to his soul's future. Not one of the 
ghosts of his hunger-slain hovered around to embitter his dying 
moments, as he had theirs. Jefferson Davis "still Hves, a 
prosperous gentleman," the idol of a large circle of adherents, 
the recipient of real estate favors from elderly females of morbid 
sympathies, and a man whose mouth is full of plaints of hu 



654 ANDEKSONVILLK. 

wrongs, and misappreciation. The rest of the leading conspi- 
rators have either departed this life in the odor of sanctity, 
surrounded by sorrowing friends, or are gliding serenely down 
the mellow autumnal vale of a benign old age. 

Only Wirz — small, insignificant, miserable Wirz, the under- 
ling, the tool, the servile, brainless, little fetcher-and-carrier of 
these men, was punished — was hanged, and upon the narrow 
shoulders of this pitiful scapegoat was packed the entire sin of 
Jefferson Davis and his crew. "What a farce ! 

A petty little Captain made to expiate the crimes of Gen- 
erals, Cabinet Officers, and a President. IIow absurd 

But I do not ask for vengeance. I do not ask for retribution 
for one of those thousands of dead comrades, the glitter of 
whose sightless eyes will follow me through life. I do not 
desire even justice on the still living authors and accomplices 
in the deep damnation of their taking off. I simply ask that 
the great sacrifices of my dead comrades shall not be suffered 
to pass unregarded to irrevocable oblivion ; that the example of 
their heroic self-abnegation shall not be lost, but the lesson it 
teaches be preserved and inculcated into the minds of their 
fellow-countrymen, that future generations may profit by it, 
and others be as ready to die for right and honor and good 
government as they were. And it seems to me that if wo are 
to appreciate their virtues, we must loathe and hold up to 
opprobrium those evil men whose malignity made all their 
sacrifices necessary. I cannot understand what good self-sacri- 
fice and heroic example are to serve in this world, if they are to 
be followed by such a maudlin confusion of ideas as now 
threatens to obhterate all distinction between the men who 
fought and died for the Eight and those who resisted them for 
the Wrong. 



R D-107 



PP/PF 




Thank Ood for rest, where none moleBt, 

And none can make afraid — 
For Peace iliat sits as Plenty h i^ne.H 

Beneath the homestead shade 1 
Brinff pike and gun, the sword's red ecoarge. 

The ne'To's broken chains, 
And beat" them at the blacksmith's forge 

To plowshares for our plains. 

Alike henceforth our hills of snow, 

And vales wher^ cotton flowers ; 
All streams that flow, all winds that blow. 

Are Freedom's motive-powers. 
Henceforth to Labor's chivalry 

Be knightly honors paid ; 
For nobler than the sword s shall t)e 

The sickle's accolade. -"Wijittib*. 



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